How accurate are analytics stats?

  • Resolved unklee

    (@unklee)


    10 months, 2 weeks ago

    Hi, I suppose you get this question all the time, but I’m hoping there is some data on it please.

    I have managed a couple of websites for 10-15 years and used Google Analytics until I didn’t feel happy with it any more. I started using another Analytics package which seemed to give similar results to Google so I was happy with it – except it added so many tables to my database and was way more complex than I needed.

    I decided to trial Burst because it looks exactly what I want. Except when comparing it to my existing analytics software over a fortnight of daily stats, Burst Pageviews & Visits are consistently 15-25% below the other. (Visits 80% with SD 0.07; pageviews 83% SD 0.09.) Since it is easier to think visits might be missed rather than false visits invented, it makes me wonder about Burst’s accuracy.

    I ran a test where I visited a bunch of obscure pages on my site and counted them all, and both packages were almost exactly right (each missed one visit, I don’t know why). So that test was fine, but the fortnightly test is worrying.

    I’m not so pedantic as to expect or require total accuracy, but 20% seems a largish difference. Has anyone done tests to explain what is happening here please?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Hessel de Jong

    (@hesseldejong)

    Hi @unklee,

    This is most likely caused by us excluding bounces from pageviews, sessions, and visitors.

    In the future, we would like to add an option, maybe through a filter to enable and disable this. So that you could also see all data including bounces. Other than that there will always be small differences because of different blocklists etc.

    Hope this explains!

    Kind regards,
    Hessel

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Thanks for this explanation. I can understand that bounces can be hard to track, but I can’t see wht I would want to exclude them. Analytics is obviously a complex thing. Thanks again for informing me.

    Plugin Author Hessel de Jong

    (@hesseldejong)

    No worries! Our decision to exclude them was because we wanted a cleaner dataset. But in retrospect, this was not the best idea. This year we want to add more filters and make the filters more intuitive. With that update, we will also add a filter to see pageviews, sessions and visitors including bounces (That might even become the default). We do keep track of the bounces though. So the update will also allow for data from the past to be seen.

    Thank you for asking, so we can improve based on your information ??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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