Got a disparity in my analytics, it is a UK focused *.co.uk showing: lang-us 40% but loc US 7.7%.
keyplyr
3:41 am on Jul 5, 2017 (gmt 0)
If you are referring to "Google Analytics", it is famous for misinformation. It is just wrong on a lot of reporting, always has been. It sync's well with Adwords/Adsense data, but as a site traffic reporting tools, it's pretty bad.
Mark_A
7:24 am on Jul 5, 2017 (gmt 0)
Ok, yes Google Analytics. Thanks keyplyr I will discount it then. The two stats are so contradictory one or the other of them has to be wrong. My bet is that we don't have 40% of our visitors coming from the USA.
keyplyr
7:57 am on Jul 5, 2017 (gmt 0)
One thing GA gets wrong is humans vrs. robots. So possibly your site is getting crawled by a bot or two using a US IP address. Would make sense since the US probably has more bots than anywhere else.
I'm in the US and I have one :)
tangor
9:23 am on Jul 5, 2017 (gmt 0)
g analytics tries too hard. English is English (Uk or US), ie, it's not Russian or Spanish or French or anything else. I wouldn't a) believe it or b) be overly concerned. Other stats, however, have some value so go with the flow if the insert pageload time is not a problem on your site.
Mark_A
11:47 am on Jul 5, 2017 (gmt 0)
Thanks and yes indeed robots could skew things.
On the language thing, I wondered if some uk visitors had a US style .. no .. I don't even know how the raw logs could include data about language. Last time i looked at raw logs they didn't have such an item ...
lucy24
4:40 pm on Jul 5, 2017 (gmt 0)
I don't even know how the raw logs could include data about language.
Raw logs don't. But -- humans send an “Accept-Language” header -- any script-based process (that means most Analytics) will ask the browser to disclose its own and/or the operating system’s language preference.
Now, technically -us can be anything: pt-us, zn-us, es-us and so on. But in practice it will only be appended to en- so you could hypothesize that 40% of your English-speaking visitors are from the US, but only 7% of the total. It's still a bit skewed though, unless a huge proportion of your UK traffic speaks Welsh or Gaelic.
