Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone have the same problem as I do. I have 2 trackers which are Google Analytics and Piwik but after sometime I found out there is a discrepancy. Please read below for more information.
Here is data for yesterday (with New Piwik Last Week v1.7.1 version then).
GGA : 14 803 visits (Unique Visistors)
Piwik : 10 254 visits (Unique Visistors)
31% discrepancy.
Question
What do i have to do to match the records? or which of the statistics is the correct ones?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Respective to the different programs they are both correct. The difference comes in in HOW they calculate what a unique visitor is. No two stats aggregators work the same.
Google Analytics What's the difference between the 'Absolute Unique Visitor' report and the 'New vs. Returning' report?:
Absolute Unique Visitors
In this report, the question asked is: 'has this visitor visited the website prior to the active (selected) date range?' The answer is a simple yes or no. If the answer is 'yes,' the visitor is categorized under 'Prior Visitors' in our calculations; if it is no, the visitor is categorized under 'First Time Visitors.' Therefore, in your report, visitors who have returned are still only counted once.
Piwik FAQs:
How is a 'unique visitor' counted in Piwik?
Unique Visitors is the number of visitors coming to your website; Unique Visitors are determined using first party cookies.
If the visitor doesn't accept cookie (disabled, blocked or deleted cookies), a simple heuristic is used to try to match the visitor to a previous visitor with the same features (IP, resolution, browser, plugins, OS, ...).
Note that by default, Unique Visitors are available for days, weeks and months periods, but Unique Visitors is not processed for the "Year" period for performance reasons. See how to enable Unique Visitors for all date ranges.
They both use cookies to determine uniques, but both go about it calculating them in different ways. It's apples and oranges when comparing stats packages side by side.
Examine the rest of the stats beyond unique visitors. If there is a wide margin across the board, take a close look at the implementation of both.
If all is well with both implementations, then pick one and go with it for the stats. Overall trends is what you are looking for. Are the stats you want to go up going up? Are the stats you want to go down going down?
Related
I wonder whether someone can help me please.
I have a user who under a specific property, sporadically receives the following error:
Some hits sent on 03-Jul-2018 to property ...... exceeded one or more hit quotas and were therefore not processed.
Hits can be dropped when daily or monthly hit limits are exceeded. You can view your hit volume levels in Property Settings in Analytics.
Hits can also be dropped if visitor hit limits are exceeded. This can happen when your site is incorrectly generating the visitor ID for a GA session. Contact your website administrator to check that the visitor ID generation has been correctly implemented.
They are not using the Premium account but when I look at the data for the day in question, there aren't any issues with regards to 'High Cardinality' which unless I've misunderstood I'd expect to see.
Could someone look at this please and offer some guidance where the issue may be because this area is fairly new to me.
Many thanks and kind regards
Chris
Collection limits are influenced by 2 factors:
The tracker: whether you use ga.js,gtag.js,analytics.js etc... here are the details.
The property type: whether you are using GA (10M hits / month) or GA 360 (2B hits / month).
In your case you are facing a property limit. To find out when such limits where reached, you can create a custom report using a time dimension (eg date+time) combined with the hits metric. You can also combine the hit metrics with other dimensions (country, browser, device) to see if you find any patterns as to why you're getting so many hits.
Cardinality is something else: it refers to the number of unique value combinations for your dimensions. For instance if you have 500K events where each event category is different, you'll have a Cardinality of 500K on the event category dimension. The more hits, the more likely you'll have a high cardinality, but the 2 aren't necessary related (if you send 10B events with the same category, the cardinality on the category is 1).
So focus on identifying and solving your limits/quotas issue, as it's the real issue here:
If the number of hits is legitimate (you have a huge amount of traffic), then the only options are to upgrade to GA 360 or reduce the number of hits for each session
If the number of hits is abnormally high (eg traffic is stable but hits increased dramatically), look for implementation issues, especially generic event trackers such as error tracking with tools like Google Tag Manager
I currently manage quite a few Google Analytics accounts for different websites and am trying to work out how to remove certain Anayltics spam from these accounts. I have previously added filters like excluding Russia visitors as the businesses are local UK based but I am now getting a lot of traffic from:
Language - not set
&
Page - sharebutton.to
If i was to exlucde the above would that get rid of any actual visitors as well as spam or will it get rid of 100% spam?
If someone could help with this that would be brilliant.
Many Thanks
Paul
Filters based on countries or the name of the spam are not efficient because both can be easily changed by the spammers.
Also, it isn't possible to filter the (not set) entries in Analytics, this label is added after the visit is recorded when Analytics doesn't find a value for that dimension.
Instead what you should use
One hostname filter, this will help prevent the majority of the spam, whether it shows as referral, page, language, etc. and independently of the name used by the spammer.
A source filter for the sneaky crawlers which are far less frequent.
Here you will find detailed instructions on how to create the hostname filter and other measures you can take to prevent fake traffic.
An affiliate website sends traffic to a shop, which should compensate it for purchases up to 90 days after the first visit.
To calculate the compensation, the shop produces with GA a conversion report based on traffic source, but it seems to be excluding returning customers (which account for about 55%).
How is it possible to ensure the original traffic source gets retained for at least 90 days?
Try this report: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversion. After that select 90 days range:
For this to work you need to have custom Conversion Segments set up properly. Check it out, i think you will find youre solution there.
I have several months worth of data in Google Analytics that is currently more or less useless, because some pageviews were being counted 2 or 3 (or more?) times.
The issue as far as I can tell came from a combination of a jQuery address plugin and AddThis' adding a tracking # to URLs shared on social media.
I've removed the plugins and implemented this filter to stop Google Analytics from tracking trailing vs. non-trailing slashes as 2 or more pageviews.
It works now, but is there a good way to go back and apply the filter to previous months?
The data should be salvageable I think, since Analytics tracked the Sessions correctly, but the Pageviews and Unique Pageviews way too high.
Comparing an affected time period last year to the same (unaffected) time period this year:
Unfortunately... Once GA data is sent and processed on their servers, it can't be changed.
Although your "pages/session" and "bounce rate" are unreliable, most of the other information should still be fine, for example "device type". Even conversion rate percentages are calculated as Conversions / Users - so in most cases that won't be affected.
Has anyone else seen this issue?
As of roughly 2 weeks ago, I get conflicting figures for the Total Visits metric between the Traffic Sources report and the other reports (e.g. Visitors, Dashboard). For example, for the week of 5/9/2010 through 5/15/2010, the Dashboard and Visitors reports both say 386 Visits. The Traffic Sources report says 157 Visits, and the 4 main source types (Search, Direct, Referral, Other) sum to 157 Visits, not 386.
Any ideas? Is this a known bug, or could there be a configuration issue?
Thanks.
Well it seems that quite a few GA users have observed unaccounted-for behavior, particularly during the past couple of months.
For instance,
18 - 19 May 2010:
more than 40 different GA users posted to the GA
User Forum all regarding the same
issue: no data whatever was
recorded in their GA Accounts
during the 18th and 19th of May. No
response from Google and nothing in
the GA Blog. Several users who had
other GA accounts that were functioning normally during this period, suggested that the problem might be caused by recent changes by Google to the GATC (which was in fact recently revised)--many of those who posted on the Forum said that indeed they had recently added the latest version of the GATC to their Sites/Pages.
6 - 9 May 2010:
Over 50 GA users reported, by
posts to the GA Forum, a complete
GA outage during the period 6 - 9 May
(no data appearing in their reports
for at least one of those days). This
time a GA Team member did respond with
a one-line response "there was a
delay in reporting, no data was lost."
This post also referenced a Twitter
message 4 from GA stating the same
thing.
In addition, i've seen a half dozen, perhaps more, recent posts (past 60 days) on the GA Forum in which users reported significant discrepancies between an aggregate figure and the sum of the constituents--both sets of figures from the same Report, e.g.,
Numbers Don't add up on the Absolute Unique Visitor's Report
Search Engine drill-down visitors don't match total
Neither Post was answered (either by the GA Team or anyone else).
Finally, since it's just a matter of clicking a menu and selecting a different option, i suggest comparing the figures you recited in your question with the analogous figures for Page Views, which is probably the simplest measurement in client-side analytics ("Visits" by contrast is strongly influenced by user cookie manipulation).
Through some trial-and-error looking at every specific source, I've traced the error to one item: within the Traffic Sources reports for the affected days (the issue seems to have partially righted itself as of yesterday's data, at least for my account), the delta/error/black hole was always equal to the Google CPC Search traffic for that day.
I have no idea what's causing the issue, but at least I know how to manually attribute the numbers. Hopefully Google has fixed this...
Thank you to all who commented/answered. I appreciate it.