Accuracy Of Google Analytics??

[cread]

I have recently purchased traffic from ROI Performance Media. I set up a subdomain that is a duplicate of my domain to be able to track all the traffic from entry to goal conversion.

The numbers that ROI is giving me for traffic are several (5) times higher than what google anaytics is showing me.

ROI says that Google is not perfect and that their numbers are right. They are offering to send me some other "free" tracking software that does a better job than google analytics.

Has anyone seen problems of accuracy with google anaytics, or did I just get cheated again?

Thanks,

Charles

[imsickofwebpro]

The main reason Google is lower is because Google doesn't include visits from known SearchBots/Crawlers in it's general traffic reports. This is huge when it comes to sales forecasting.

Statcounter software would have to know the IP addresses of every Spider, pinger, and crawler currently surfing the web. I assume there's 1000's.

So in many statcounter software packages, a number of Website Crawlers are overlooked and not filtered from the general traffic reports.

To verify this, check the recorded IP's of some of your visitors. Copy and paste the hostname or url into google/yahoo/msn and do a search. You will find many of your visitors are Telecommunications providers, domain registries, and WebsiteCrawlers.

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[ldylion214]

I'm with Charles. I've just switched to GA and I notice a huge drop in visits. I'm devastated to think what was 1500 visits is really only 226. That seems crazy. I also have SmarterStats thru my host. I think I would have rather remained clueless.

[wige]

Also bear in mind, Google Analytics is completely dependent on Javascript in order to function. Some users do disable this technology. However, that should not account for a 1/5 variance in traffic reported. If anything, you might expect GA's numbers to be off by up to 10%. Generally, if you run a local analytics program that analyzes your internal logs, which counts everything including bots and users without javascript, and you run GA which counts everything but bots and users without javascript, your actual visitors should be somewhere in the middle, probably closer to GA then the local analytics program.

[incrediblehelp]

Stat packages are really relative. As most suggest javascript based packages miss spider traffic and could be filtering our some visitors. I would suggest running a localized log analyzer that can run against you raw logs and then use one online that is robust and free as GA.

[ldylion214]

THanks for the info. I thought StatCounter was also a javascript counter.

[cread]

Thanks everyone. We are going to a server log package and see what is going on.

Charles