Why does Google Analytics show less visits than One&One stats?

Question

Comparing google analytics results to one&one hosting monthly statics shows a huge discrepancy.

For last month: Google shows 1046 visits. One&one stats show 15304 unique visits.

The google code is in the footer which appears on every page.

I'm aware ga only works with js enabled but to assume that many non js users???

Answer 1

Check the page views in Google Analytics - it's possible that 1&1 is tracking unique page views instead of the actual visits.

Answer 2

Google Analytics works for almost all users (I believe less than 5% have JS disabled). I have had the same discrepancy, in my case the difference was zeroed out when I took into account the bots (which server-side statistics often take into account, as they produce http-requests). You probably have the same "problem".

Neither stats are wrong, they just count different things. Google Analytics is the more "accurate", i.e. the numbers you want to take a look at. The hosting stats, which look only at http requests, often without filtering, are less interesting.

Answer 3

Google Analytics is a good indicator of how many humans are visiting your website.

Here are some things to check:

1. how many bots are in your monthly stats? You can usually find something that says User-Agent in your stats page. GoogleBot, Slurp, msnbot & others will be visiting every page on your site.
2. that you've read Google Analytics' definition of a visit.
3. that you have read what your statistics provider means by unique visit. Does that mean unique visitor, page view or something else?

Raw hits on servers can be misleading for a number of reasons..

1. If you have external style sheets & JavaScript etc, they could be counted as a hit in the webserver log
2. RSS feed readers will periodically update without being asked to by a human