Why is Google analytics showing the wrong results on my website?

Question

Why is Google analytics showing the wrong results on my website?

2 Answers

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Answer 1

There could be a bunch of different reasons, how long has it been and why do you think there is a discrepancy?

Have you embedded the analytics tracking code manually?

The main two reasons for variances in traffic that I've experienced are:

Bot traffic. Google is pretty good at spotting bots, whereas other analytics tools often don't distinguish.
Lag. I find that it often takes 1-2 days for analytics to update with a full picture of traffic for a specific day. The longer you wait, the better.

Also... If you're running a custom report on a large number of pages, analytics sometimes displays an average based on a sample set of pages rather than getting data from every individual page.

You should see a yellow box in the corner of the report explaining this if it is the case though.

Answer 2

Referrer spam has been the brand new horror for people who are generally counting intensely on Google analytics reports to take stock of the targeted visitors they acquire on their site from a variety of sources. The problem or headache may become severe when the company owner is obtaining visitors from affiliate sources or perhaps running Google adwords.