Are WordPress Stats and Google Analytics broken? It seems that the stats I get from one service disagree with the other. And both of those services disagree with my raw sever logs.
Google Analytics claims I got 16 hits to my entire Photoblog yesterday. This is typical for the number of hits it claims I get on most days that I post a less popular photo. It kinda make me tilt my head sideways a bit to think that I don’t have enough friends combined with people searching for photos of scantily clad women to get more than 16 hits total, but ok. Whatever.
WordPress.com Stats claims I got 14 hits on the same day. I’m sure there are some timezone overlaps, which might account for some. Additionally, I’m not sure that WordPress Stats counts hits to the Archive pages, of which Google Analytics claims I got 2. So that makes sense. The two jive with each other in that regard.
However, the photos that each stats program claims were viewed is quite different. Google only shows 4 hits to yesterday’s photo. WordPress only shows 2. WordPress shows lots of different photos that were viewed. Google shows 6 hits to the photoblog front page that aren’t indicated in WordPress.
As if that wasn’t all misleading and very skewed, the page itself has a view counter on it (visible below the photo). It’s presented there by a plugin that, supposedly, doesn’t count *MY* traffic (which WordPress.com stats claims to filter out as well). It shows 46 views for that particular photo.
To get one last point of comparison the web server stats show 53 hits on that particular image page. Now, this will count all of my traffic as well, and isn’t limited to just yesterday. With that in mind, 53 hits and the 46 views claimed by the view plug in seem to jive.
I can understand some discrepancy in the Google numbers, as some browsers don’t allow Javascript. But 4 vs 46?! That’s a 90% loss.
Even if I accept that 90% of all hits are on browsers that don’t support javascript or have javascript turned off, why aren’t the WordPress.com Stats correct? Can someone please explain this to me? Because it’s driving me crazy! Do I just have bad tech karma or are other people seeing this too?