[Plugin: WordPress.com stats] vs. google analytics

  • I understand that the wordpress.com stats plugin counts views, not visitors, but it seems to vary significantly from what I’m getting from google analytics. Specifically, GA stats are WAY lower than those with wordpress.com stats.

    Example: wordpress.com stats for yesterday: 284 “views”
    Google analytics stats for same day:     67 “visits”

    I don’t really think that my visitors are ALL or MOSTLY loading the site 5 or 6 times per day. What’s going on? Am I missing something?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter mypatraining

    (@mypatraining)

    anyone?

    Nobody knows.

    Google’s definition of “visit” is probably a very complex algorithm that they don’t share. WordPress.com’s definition of “view” is probably a much simpler algorithm. Both are at least partially proprietary and totally subject to change.

    So there is probably nobody alive today who could tell you exactly why they are different.

    In google analytics, ‘visits’ are individual people views, not page views. For example, if 1 user views 10 pages, it counts as 1 visit. In wordpress stats, a view is a pageview. So you need to compare your wordpress ‘views’ stats to your google analytics ‘pageviews’ stats (not visits). So it sounds like the stats could be about right. If each visit (67) saw 4 pages that’d be about 268 ‘views’.

    Mine are roughly the same. For yesterday, I had 1,573 views in wordpress stats and 1,882 pageviews in google analytics (only 939 visits).

    BTW, if your GA pageviews were 67 and your wordpress were 284, I’d assume that you are probably missing the GA code on certain pages and therefore they’re not all being counted.

    I think wordpress.com stats is counting bots with unique visits whereas Google analytics is just counting unique visits and does a good job at excluding bots.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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