Reasons Why Stat Counter And Google Analytics Are Different?

[Planet13]

I was just wondering if anyone has any suggestions why the number of unique visitors in Stat Counter and Google Analytics might be off?

Do they base the start of a day on different time zones?

Is it just a matter of me forgetting to put the GA code on certain pages?

Or is this a pretty common occurence?

Also, if someone has a way of checking whether the code is not present on a page by using some sore of spider / xenu or something like that, i would appreciate it.

[phranque]

is there a high percentage difference between two?

you could diff the list of urls tracked by each to see if some pages have only one of the two tracking codes.

[ken_b]

Also, if someone has a way of checking whether the code is not present on a page by using some sore of spider / xenu or something like that, i would appreciate it.

If you have a global search and replace function for the site you can search for the code for each and then compare the numbers for a quick and easy starting point.

I do a replace and add a small "comment" after the code, that lets you do a "last modified" sort to see which pages if any are missing which code.

Compare the two results and place code where needed to get a matched set (both codes on all pages).

You can always go back and delete the comment.

[Panthro]

Check what settings you have in StatCounter for "Idle Time Between Visits". Should be under your Project > Config > Project Settings. Make sure it's set to at least 1 hour (set to 30min by default).

Also, StatCounter tallies bot visits along with all other unique visits unless you elect to not show those in your logs, which they recently made it very easy to do.

Overall, I've always seen a pretty regular disparity between the visits GA and StatCounter shows. I've found the real number is usually somewhere in between the two.

[Planet13]

@ Panthro:

Thank you for the tip about the Idle time frame and about blocking the crawlers and bots from the log.

(Oddly enough, I had idle time between visits set to TWO hours... so I thought visits should be less. Also, since statcounter is JS based, I didn't think crawlers or bots would be tracked, either.)

[Planet13]

@ phranque and ken_b:

Thank you both for your suggestions. I will try to do that this weekend.

[Panthro]

Np, Planet13