Accuracy of Google Analytics

Question

I've recently started using Google Analytics to measure traffic on my blog, prior to this I was using Blogger's in built traffic overview.

I've noticed however that the two reports never match, for example Analytics reports I had 8 pageviews yesterday whereas Blogger reports 12.

Now I realise that both of these are products of Google so why the discrepancy? I would hate to think that even with pageviews being such a small number - what the reports will be like with hundreds visitors per day.

Is this to be expected?

Answer 1

One possibility is that some users might have Google Analytics blocked. For example, I use the MVPS Hosts file which has GA as an entry by default and if I visited a site that used GA, it wouldn't register. This would be the same is users are visiting the site with JavaScript turned off. Blogger might be registering page views as server requests which is why it's showing up. Some systems might be blocking it on a network level (i.e. company firewall) which would have the same effect.

That sort of thing could show a huge effect when you are in the small numbers but as you increase the volume of traffic, any difference would become minimal. It depends on the industry though. We once dealt with numerous different users who all had similar network restrictions, so we had to look at their GA with a pince of salt.

I'm not 100% on these ideas in terms of GA/Blogger but one might be recording page views and another might be recording unique users. Another possibility (again, just an idea) is that the times/timezones are different between the two.