Forum Moderators: DixonJones
A customer complained that according to GA stats, traffic has plunged. When I investigated, the numbers seemed unusually low. I did a comparison between the server logs and the GA report, for the last month. The server logged 3300 pageviews, and GA reports 1430.
Surely someone somewhere has posted some information to explain this discrepancy. But I couldn't find much. The explanation in GA Help is unhelpful ( [google.com...] ). An interesting post in this forum from last July discusses discrepancies caused by site scrapers, but I'm skeptical that more bots visit my site than humans.
I saw a post in the GA forum from Jan 9 that identifies a discrepancy in dimensional reporting. So I tested it myself myself. The Top Content report shows only 290 pageviews of my homepage. But when I drilldown and change the dimension view to hostname, GA reports 669 pageviews.
Summary of my HomePage pageview stats:
GA Top Content Report: 290 views
Server logs: 486 views
GA Content Detail Dimension: hostname): 669 views
The huge variation in these numbers is pretty discouraging. Here's a detailed entry in the GA forum that's probably relevant to readers here:
[google.com...]
-Regards
Jim
you will never come to a solid conclusion or equivalent of numerical data. it just wont happen.
yes, GA is going to show lower page views than your server logs... GA does not log any bots, crawlers, spiders..etc... as i believe they do not trigger the javascript required to log a visitor.
your raw sever logs catch everything.
again, dont get stuck on counting clicks, pageviews, or visits... (so many names these days)...
Look at trends. See where they are going, and how long they stay on those pages. Look at your bounce rates of specific pages... analytics is more than just counting clicks... its a hard trend to buck, but if you can get your management to look less at the amount of page views, and more at what the page itself is doing, you wont be caught up in generating reports for just numbers.
