Huge pageview difference between Google Analytics, GoSquared and my own stats

Question

I got quite a difference between the number of pageviews on my blog in Google Analytics, GoSquared and from my own database. What I have in my database is a table that stores the IP of the visitor and the post ID.

The number of post views I extract from the database is significantly higher than Google Analytics' and GoSquared's numbers... Like, 28 for GA, 67 for GoSquared and 102 in my database.

What does this mean? To me, it seems like a whole lot of visitors have JavaScript disabled. Could this be it? Or would this just be add-ons like Ghostery and others? Or something else?

Answer 1

Google does not log automated crawlers, they really can't even if they wanted to since spiders /crawlers don't execute JavaScript and there are a ton of those out there so at low numbers they will account for a major percentage of your visits. I am not familiar with GoSquared; I took a quick look and it seems like it is also just JavaScript so it seems surprising the discrepancy between the two services. One answer might be if they have a <noscript> tag with an image inside it; these are usually not really images but another way to call the tracking server. While most crawlers would likely ignore images; there are other's such as Google Images that would the img src. I know this isn't a dead-ringer sort of answer but hopefully provides some insights.