WP Statistics Numbers Off, Way Off

The most likely case is there is a robot indexing your site that we don’t detect correctly.

WP Statistics records every page load and then excludes what it can identify as a bot. It doesn’t do any client side processing to do this so some bot’s fake the user agent well enough to get through.

Okay, thank you. So presumably there isn’t anything I can do on my side to correct this, or exclude this particular bot from the numbers?

Not unless you can identify it with a user agent string we can match against.

If you want to try you can enable the “Store entire user agent string” in the Statistics->Settings->General page. WP Statistics will then record the raw UA string from the client in the database.

There’s no user interface to view the UA data, but you can use phpMyAdmin or export it through the plugin and see if anything pops up.

Hi!
I have used this plugin since I started my blog and was happy about the traffic. But now I have had a first look at Google Analytics and I seem to have that problem, too. So what does that mean? That the stats from this plugin cannot be taken as true? I am really confused.

For January 1 this plugin showed I had 518 visits, Google Analytics shows I had 3 sessions and Jetpack shows 30 views. What am I to make of this? This is really confusing to me. Can anyone help? I don’t really have any experience with the different analysis plugins. Thank you.

From the FAQ:

I’m using another statistics plugin/service and get different numbers for them, why?

Pretty much every plugin/service is going to give you different results for visits and vistors, there are several reasons for this:
?Web crawler detection
?Detection method (javascript vs server side PHP)
?Centralized exclusions

Services that use centralized databases, like Google Analytics, for spam and robot detection have better detection than WP Statistics can. The trade off of course is relaying on an external service.

Hi Greg,
thanks for the quick response. Yes, I have seen that but why is there such a huge difference? I mean, WP Stats told me I had over 10,000 visitors and Google says it was just 770. That is insane. Is there something I can fix?

Visitors or Visits?

More than likely you have a bot scanning your site. Check the top visitors list as well as your top pages list.

A common issue is brute force login attempts, to exclude these you can exclude the login page from the statistics.

If it is a couple of visitors hitting the site many times you can enable the honey pot or set the number of hits before they are treated like robots to exclude these users.

As the FAQ says, a centralized service like Google can detect distributed attacks and exclude them from the statistics, where as WP Statistics on a single site cannot really tell the difference between an infected PC visiting the site and a real user as on a per site basis they look the same.

Visitors. Visites were over 26000. I have done what you suggested.However, whenever I try to enter a number for the Robot visit threshold it resets to 0 after I save. Why is that? What can I do about it? I have a hunch that many of the bots are from the US and China since these countries do not really appear in my google stats.

This is not resolved. Still af problem. Google Analytics says 5 visitors today, WP Statistics says 85 visitors today. I need reliable data, or it is useless. Love the dashboard and the layout, but the value is in the data.

stynda: The robot threshold is a bug, it will be fixed in the next release, if you want to manually fix it, go to your wordpress\wp-content\plugins\wp-statistics\includes\settings\tabs\wps-access-level.php file. Line 173 should be:

<input id="robot_threshold" type="text" value="0" size="5" name="wps_robot_threshold" <?php echo $WP_Statistics->get_option('robot_threshold');?>>

replace it with:

<input id="wps_robot_threshold" type="text" size="5" name="wps_robot_threshold" value="<?php echo $WP_Statistics->get_option('robot_threshold');?>">

p_nilsson: WP Statistics will not detect the kind of distributed robot’s that Google can. The decentralized nature of WP Statistics makes it nearly impossible to identify these kinds of visitors as robots but we continue to improve WP Statistics as we find new ways to do so.

Neither Google nor WP Statistics are “correct” numbers, both have limitations but they are different, which is why you see different numbers from each of them.