My site counter states only 3000 visitors but on my account panel it states 8000 served.. its quite a huge descrepency there...
Hi lucaslee,
This is a very common question. Here is something we post on our FAQ, sales page as well as our confirmation email to be very sure customers understand this.
Why doesn't my Google Analytics/Adsense and certain counters match up 100% with your stats?
There are many reasons that a visitor will not register with your server.
1. A user immediately cancels out the window before your site loads
2. The user is on a slow connection and your tracking software times out as a result
3. The user's ISP or browser saved a previous version of your site and served the new request from the cache instead of from your server
4. Your site was unavailable (down) at the time of request
5. Your tracking software could not handle multiple concurrent request.
6. The visitor who came 24 hours ago have visited your website aGoogle Analytics and Google Adsense and your stat counter did not count it as unique hit.
The problem of the Google Analytics and Adsense is getting worse. They just made a major update around December 2011 and that led to a MAJOR flood of complaints by many of our top customers. It is getting so bad instead of detecting 30% of the traffic - users are reporting that only 10% are detected.
There are MANY complaints about Google Analytics and Google Adsense's accuracy. Most reporting less than half of the visitors are tracked at all. See:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-reliable-is-google-analytics
http://www.webmasterworld.com/analytics/3395441.htm
That is why we made it very clear in our website and in our email messages that you should not use Google Analytics and Adsense.
We asked many of our top customers to use http://statcounter.com/ and while it doesn't track 100% - actually closer to 70% - some came back and were very much happier because they saw the true numbers.
Here is another proof that Google Analytics and Adsense does not work. We received an email from a prospective client on 4-Mar 2012: "A friend of mine used your service and he could see thousands of unique visitors in awstats but none of those unique visitors showed up in google analytics. Why is that? Jake -
[email protected]" proving that Google Analytics and Google Adsense really does not work.
There are more factors and if you want to make sure you received exact visitors then Raw Server Logs, statcounter.com and extremetracking.com are the most accurate method for traffic comparison.
In fact, we frequently test many of the competitive traffic suppliers out there and its exactly the same issue.
Recently, we have received many feedback from our clients that Google Analytics and Google Adsense are only tracking 10% of their traffic. We did not change our traffic. Google Analytics and Google Adsense had changed their algorithm - constantly. We cannot be held accountable if the doorman (Google Analytics) is asleep 90% of the time. That is why we have made many requests to our customers in our website and emails not to use Google Analytics and Google Adsense.
That is also why in our website we stated very clearly in our Terms of Service that:
"You recognize that Google Analytics (Google Analytics and Google Adsense) does not track our traffic very well and agree that our cpanel web traffic counter as the only reference. You are encouraged to use statcounter.com or extremetracking.com in place of Google Analytics and Google Adsense."
Please excuse us if we write so much but we need our customers to be very clear why Google Analytics and Google Adsense should not be used.
Cheers!
innovalist
