Why Website Visits Can Drop When You Move to Google Analytics

If you’re a smart website owner then you’ll be tracking and measuring your site traffic with a tool such as AwStats or Google Analytics. If you use both though, this can cause some head scratching, because they can present some wildly different results. Some people say they only get a third of the traffic when they move over to Google. What’s going on?

Firstly, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean your traffic has actually dropped – it’s just that these different tools use different methods to measure your traffic. Logfile analyzers like AwStats look at the actual activity on your server and track the downloads of every single file – full pages, images, PDFs, scripts and so on. Google Analytics uses a tiny piece of Javascript on each page and tracks opens of full pages from visitors browsers.

Here are some factors that can make the results from these systems different:

• Robots (like Googlebot) don’t run Javascript so these visits won’t show up in Google Analytics
• Browsers cache website pages (i.e. keep a local copy on the computer) so they don’t always have to download pages that visitors read often. If this happens the web page view won’t show up at all on a log file (AwStats). Google Analytics can track the page view though because it runs on the browser
• Some browsers have Javascript disabled so Google won’t track any website visits
• Some visitors will have security software that stops Google working

There are pros and cons to each approach and I won’t confuse you with the detail (leave a comment or ask me if you’d like an explanation though!)

The basic message is that Google Analytics probably will show you a smaller number of visitors (maybe even a lot smaller). Many of these missed visits will be from automatic bots that are out there on the net crawling and indexing your site. You probably shouldn’t really care about them anyway, unless you’re worried about your site being indexed.

If you want some proof of this, take a look at a log file from a typical day of activity. Your internet host should provide these for you. Take a look through for robots (try a search for ‘bot’) – you may be surprised how often these visits happen.

Tags: analytics, Google, traffic, visitors

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