Hi Janine,
Do you have any idea whats wrong with Google Analytics. Google Analytics shows me a ridiculously low number of page views including today’s post.
Through Adobe Feeds alone, I have 140 clicks but Google Analytics shows me only 78 page views. For the same post, Blogger reports 560 views. Who should I believe?
Thank you,
Bojan
Hi Bojan,
Great question. All of those services measure traffic in different ways.
Some of the ‘traffic’ you get to your site is not really visitors, but bots or other automated programs that are indexing your site, scraping it, or doing other tasks.
Some of these are legitimate. For example, Google sends out a bot to index your site and that’s how you get included in their search results.
But some of these automated visitors are nefarious. For example, scrappers that may be trying to steal your content or your email address.
Not all traffic reporting services are the same, some are better than others at counting or excluding this kind of automated traffic. That’s just one of the reasons they give different results, but it’s probably one of the biggest differences.
Most people are surprised to learn how much of the traffic to their sites and blog posts is not really from ‘visitor’s but from computers.
That said, if you’ve noticed a big difference in Google Analytics recently, then I’d say they’ve either started excluding more traffic from ‘bad sources’ they’ve gotten better at identifying, or there may be a problem with the Google Analytics code on your site.
If that’s the problem, it’s possible that you’ve somehow you’ve lost the code on some of your pages and Google is not longer able to track it. Go in and view the source on your pages or check the footer area when you view source to make sure the Google tracking code still appears on all of your pages.