I got this question last week from @99boxesofshoes on Twitter. She wants to know why Google Analytics statistics differ from the stats found in her Blogger dashboard AKA Blogger stats.
This is a great question because it is something that probably bugs a lot of bloggers. Which stats are correct? What do I give to companies when they ask for stats? Why are they different?!
So why do Google Analytics stats differ from Blogger stats? Let’s find out!
Note: if you are in WordPress and have JetPack stats, this post is also useful. Just replace “Blogger stats” with “JetPack stats” and the whole article will apply to you as well.
In short, Google Analytics uses an entirely different tracking system than Blogger stats. It is a common (and true) belief that Google Analytics stats are generally more accurate.
A common misconception is that this number is off because Blogger stats count your own pageviews. That is simply not true because Google Analytics also counts your own pageviews. Disabling Blogger stats from counting your own pageviews might make your numbers closer to a match, but it will not be giving you the most accurate information.
The main reason why these numbers are different is that the Blogger stats system counts visits from robots and search crawlers. You see, search engines like Yahoo, Google and Bing go out and crawl the web for pages and content multiple times each day. Every time they crawl your site, it is counted as a pageview in your Blogger stats. Those are not real people and are not really pageviews. I know, your Blogger stats are so much better! But they are not your true stats. Additionally, the Blogger system counts spam bots, while Google Analytics has the capabilities to identify these bots and to not count them as pageviews.
This discrepancy is good to know when you are buying advertising spots on other sites. If they claim a certain number of pageviews, shoot them an email and ask if that is from their Google Analytics or their Blogger stats. I have seen numbers differ by as much as 50%. So if a site is claiming 30,000 pageviews per month, it could actually be 15,000. That is important information to know when you are spending money on advertising.
For many of you, this post may come as a harsh reality. Your true stats are probably lower than what you see in your Blogger dashboard. Your best bet is to set up Google Analytics and to go by the numbers provided by GA. They are the most accurate and using those numbers going forward is the best thing to do.
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Right before I started reading this blog i was looking at my stats wondering why there was such a large discrepancy. That makes so much sense now! Thank you so much for this post. My blog stat sanity thanks you as well.
Haha, no problem! Always happy to help bloggers stay sane! 😀
Hey Zack! Thanks again for answering this question. Silly question but isn’t Blogger run by Google? Haha makes me wonder why they couldn’t keep the same tracking system in blogger as they do for GA. Nevertheless this helps. Thanks!
Hey! No problem! Thanks for the inspiration for a post!
Yes, as I was typing the post, I realized how odd that is too! They should use the same tracking, but it’s Google and sometimes things they do make no sense. 🙂
Another useful hint: you can set GA to ignore your own visits. (I found the process tedious and frustrating, and I finally resorted to blocking GA in Ghostery. There’s irony. But it’s unblocked now — I think; eh, Zack? Mac/Chrome/Washington — and not counting my own visits.
Also, StatCounter is _extremely_ miserly in its traffic reports. Blogger will tell me I had 300 visits. GA will say 87. SC says 4. What the heck, SC?
Great blog!
Robin
Rusty Ring: Reflections of an Old-Timey Hermit
Yes, you can set GA to block your own visits, but I found that process just a little too complicated for the reward. I checked my GA and I am showing a visit from Vancouver WA today, so if that’s where you are, you successfully unblocked it!
Getting different stats is frustrating, but I recommend to everyone that they only go by Google Analytics, as it seems to be the most accurate and most complete tracking system.
Have a good weekend!
Ha ha! This does not explain the discrepancy in ONE day. On July 26, my blog had a huge release — a very important new blog post pushed by a lot of PR and social media. Blogger stats says, 9,000 page views. GA says 1,850 page views (and I do mean page views — not visitors). This is a massive discrepancy that cannot by explained by bots. Further, if I look at the history of Blogger stats (say one week earlier to the July 26 post) there is only a slight discrepancy in Blogger stats reporting higher page views than GA. So, what accounted for the 500% difference on July 26? Today is Sunday the 28th. I should be seeing the full report from GA. I ran real time tests in GA to ensure that the blog was being tracked at all! Yes, the blog is being tracked, yes my GA code includes subdomains (my blog runs on blog.mydomain.com). It is true that my GA code is at the bottom of my page, not installed just before . But does this really matter? It is being tracked in Blogger stats and GA. The only other thing I can think of, and this is scary, is if a high level cache value (set in .htaccess) is causing this distortion. But, if that is true, why no discrepancies pre-July 26? Truly, my head is spinning over this one.
Hmm, that is definitely a huge discrepancy. The only thing I can think is that it does matter where you put the CA code. I always put mine just before the closing head tag. Perhaps since that single post was promoted so heavily, the discrepancy is from pageviews on that single page, as opposed to your normal mix of homepage views and single post views. There is a chance that where you implemented the code, it has not been tracking single post views and since that day you had so many single post views, there is a huge discrepancy. That’s all I got! Hope it helps!
GA misses people who don’t have Javascript and cookies enabled so it is an under count. I have see visits by someone who contacted me via email and discussed pages he read and I didn’t see the visits in GA. Also, GA now records certain kind of bot visits that aren’t recorded as hits on the Blogger server. These are theguardlan.com and a hundred others. You can exclude these with minimal effort. Your actual pageviews are somewhat above GA and well below Blogger stats, at least in my experience.
Thank you for your help!!!!!!! Will be changing code position!!!!!!!!!
Hi, love this blog, thanks, I was wonderring where you got the social widget bar from on the left of screen, ???, and this is a genuine request, I have looked at the blog and know there is 5 incoming comments, this is not a spam request..
Many thanks
Mark
Hi Mark, it is from a WordPress plugin called Flare.
Ah, makes sense! I’ve been wondering this for the longest time. I’m glad I finally googled it and your post popped up – thank you!
I’m glad you found me! Thanks for dropping a comment!
I have the opposite problem. My GA stats are better (twice as much) as my Blogger stats. Any ideas or suggestions for why that would be and how to fix it?
Now that one I can’t seem to figure out. :/
Same here. My GA stats are much higher than my Blogger. I notice the ‘active page’ is often described as:
/u/0/_/widget/render/plus…EeNBuLIxtlDm66SKHoGr5n2mQ
Anyone know what that means?
hmm… not sure what that widget is but I assume it’s something that you have on every page that is being picked up as a visit.
But this is a straightforward Blogger page. I’ve not added anything. I wouldn’t know how. And it doesn’t come up every time.
Could you have added the analytics code twice on accident?
Thanks for the info – most useful, and resolved the puzzle.
Handy too, as I was putting together some ad stats for an advertiser, and best to have the most accurate available, even if they are lower than I’d previously thought.
Ah yes it’s usually depressing when you first see the comparison, but it’s good to be accurate.
Hi,
I have a question… hoping you can answer me:)
today, I used the Google analytics. I also tested it how to operate it. It is a great system !
I posted a new journal on my blog previously, the Blogger stats showed that I had a visitor, but the Google analytics didn’t show that I had a visitor. I found the visitor which used key word ( the link of my blog) via ” www,google.com” to research my blog. The visitor uses the MAC operating system.. Does this unreal people make it?
Thank you!
Yes, Google Analytics is a great system!
A lot of your search results will show up that way. People use Google for just about everything, including typing in http://www.yourblog.com into Google. That is how you get results like the one you shared.
I recently had my blog redesigned and saw a significant drop in GA analytics visitors, but only increases in webmaster tools stats, blogger stats and pinterest stats. Sometimes blogger tells me I have had visitors from specific countries that don’t get picked up in analytics. It wasn’t a big change, no change in structure or domain, just a template redesign, my GA tracking ID remained in my blogger settings.
There is no GA code in my blogger template code (well, that I can understand), but it does appear when I view my HTML (CTRL+Shift+J in Chrome – I don’t know what this function is called!) but it appears in the section under WidgetManager.SetDataContext. If this is the wrong place, and if so how can I get it within the head section as you’ve mentioned above?
I’m pretty confused, I’m sure GA is not picking up all my pageviews but I’m at a loss! Thanks!
The reason that you see some traffic in one place and not another is that one tracks bots from other countries and one does not. Analytics will show you a more true and accurate count of real stats. I wrote a post on installing Google Analytics code on a site. Check it out here: http://morefromyourblog.com/how-to-set-up-google-analytics-on-your-blog/
page-views of my website, according to word press stats are less than Google analytics. Which stat would i believe to be actual. Thanks 🙂
Analytics is always the most accurate.
Hi Zack,
So, if I have an independent pageviews html that I put on my blog, does that count all of the spam bots and web crawls also?
regards
Jordy
Hmm. That I am not sure of. What I would recommend is that you go through Google Analytics, as their tracking system is far and away the best and most complete.
Hi Zack,
I’ve been reading up on this a lot and your analysis pretty much tracks what other people are saying. I have been comparing my GA to Blogger stats and have faced up to the truth that don’t really have 22,000+ visitors but shouldn’t the relative visits be in the same neighborhood? For the past few days my Blogger stats show twice the usual activity but GA shows half the usual activity. Have the bots hit me hard the last two days? I have gotten a lot of spam comments. Is that a clue?
Diane
Hi Diane!
Yes, that is a clue and unfortunately, the numbers in Blogger are commonly about double what the true Analytics numbers are. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it is. Use those higher numbers as motivation and try to get the Analytics numbers to match up!
I’m on WordPress.Org so maybe that explains the difference, but when my pageviews are out of whack, it’s GA that has the higher numbers, and JetPack for WordPress, the lower.
That is odd, the majority of the time, Jetpack shows way more users than Google. Either way, I’d trust what Google says more.
thanks, now I know what i should do, because now I am using wordpress for my new blog
Great! WordPress is a good choice!
Hi! I am in a real pickle hope you can help?
I use blogger for my platform and used the updated method of inserting, by placing the tracking ID into the Google Analytics Space under blog settings > other. 24 hours has passed and when I logged on this morning my tracking was installed and I could start to look at statistics. I clicked pageviews instead of visits so the data was comparable to my blogger analytics. This is when things didn’t add up….
First off it says I have 187 pageviews for every option: a day, a week, a month which obviously makes no sense. And when I changed the dates to the blog’s begining to now (several years!) it showed only 239 views overall. My blogger analytics says 56,000+, I have nearly 1,500 followers and have been published on platforms like Look Magazine. So, 239 pageviews for my entire blog history is just insane. I have looked at my blog more times than that alone as I have close to 300 posts! I don’t understand what I did wrong as this method of insertion works for everyone else I have talked to. When you insert it into the HTML instead where exactly do you put it? I always get thrown by the comment ‘every page you want it to track’ as I want it to track every page of my blog. So, where is the exact place you place the coding to track your entire blog content? But I don’t see how that would make a difference… Also, here is another mystery apparently my fashion and beauty blog which has around a 90% to 10% ratio of females to males following is read 60% by men and 40% females according to google analytics. It is crazy Google themselves don’t provide a clear step-by-step guide themselves so, we don’t need to reach out to others with these questions.
This makes no sense at all. Help me PLEASE!
I want to start earning money from advertising but needed to know my Unique visitors hence why I signed up to Google Analytics but with these numbers everything in accurate and worthless. I would be so happy if you could advise in anyway!
Hollie Furniss
Ok, did you just install the Analytics code 24-48 hours ago? If so, everything is probably fine. It does not go back and check stats from the past. It can only track stats after you put the tracking code there. Let me know after a couple of days if the week/month numbers still don’t change. As far as the male/female thing… that is not 100% accurate. It could be females logged into male’s Google account, on a male’s computer or a number of things. That is one of the things in Google Analytics that I don’t see as accurate all of the time.
I see so the tracking only starts from when the installation began! So, all the figures are from yesterday when I joined google analytics! This makes much more sense. Especially, as the history line shows no traffic at all until yesterday… so sorry to not know this. I just assumed it could back track to the entire history of a blog. I guess I need to wait a month now before giving advertising my stats. I shall be sure to keep monetising it and if I feel there are still problems I get in touch. Thank you so much!
Ya, the bummer is that you now have to wait to have a full month of correct stats. Glad you got it figured out though!
Hey Zack, Great Article (Y)
But my GA stats is entirely different from my WP Jetpack Site stats.
WP Jetpack Site Stats shows 3300 Views (day) where as GA is showing as 7200 Page Views (day). So which one is more accurate ? I use Chitika Ads and the number of impressions matches with GA.
It’s basically for the same reasons as the post says. Jetpack is notoriously off as far as real visitors go. I would always use GA over anything else.
So it is possible for GA to report a larger number than Jetpack and be more accurate? It’s bothered me for a while having my GA stats by higher than Jetpack, since most places I go to read about this discrepancy seem to have it flip flopped from my situation. Glad to know something isn’t wrong.
Yes, that is entirely possible. I think it depends on what kind of traffic you’re getting from crawlers and robots. I would still say, no matter how the difference comes across, Google Analytics is the most accurate and most widely used by PR companies and advertisers.
Thanks for an illuminating article, now I understand why Blogger stats diverge from GA stats (due to bots etc, hence not real visitors) but NOT to the extent I experience it! For example, yesterday 15 March 2014, I had over 1100 pageviews according to Blogger (one of my posts is having a lot of traction due to very new content) and 78 visitors only according to GA! Since each visitor views on average 1.32 pages (according to GA), that simply does not multiply to 1127 (which was the exact number given) and the discrepancy is totally unexplained…We’re not speaking of a mere 50% off here but so much more, a difference of 1 to 10! And this has been going on now for a whole year! Yes, because it’s not just a strange thing that happened on a particular day – I regularly observe those discrepancies and they are always of the order of 1 to 10. I did put the code I was given where you say (before “/head”) and I can’t imagine why the discrepancies should be so dramatic.
Woa that is crazy! That’s quite a difference. One thing you can try is to bring in another tracking service. Statcounter offers free service for smaller accounts and they have a nice installation guide for Blogger. http://statcounter.com/
I always thought that Analytics was reporting the incorrect stats. But turns out Analytics stats represent a closer number than that of Blogger. Oh well.
As you said, this post came as a harsh reality, i was kind of happy seeing the blogger stats everyday. Going to set up GA anyway.
Ah, sorry to be the bearer of bad news…but you’ll really like GA when you get used to it.
Great information. I’ve been using WP Stats for a long time and noticed the increased growth over time. I’ve recently starting getting into the point of gaining advertising or researching it. Found GA and realized the stats were very misleading. The weird part is WP Stats will have a significantly high number. Such as on Apr. 22, big news broke and we were one of the first to have something on it, putting us around 42,000 views according to WP Stats. However, GA said we had just 130 that day.
I don’t have ANY code for GA installed, would that matter?
Yes, not having the code installed matters. If you install the code just before the tag it will track on every page on your site. WP Stats are more accurate than Blogger platform stats, but I would still install the GA code and see if things look better. GA stats provide great intel on who is visiting your site, how they get there and what they do once they are there.
Wait, my Blogger stats are lower than my GA stats.
That happens sometimes as well. I would trust GA either way.
Thank you for this. I was wondering why I the statistics were so different in blogger and google analytics. Although I have much more visits in blogger, google analytics is counting my own visits (how can I disable that?).
I used to have huge visits from Russia, like 10 at a time and from a cell-phone network. I could see that it was obviously something robotic and not a person, but now I understood that sometimes single visits are also robotic. Hope my english is understandable.
To disable your own visits from counting, use one of the methods on this page: http://www.azanweb.com/en/5-ways-to-exclude-your-own-visits-from-google-analytics/
Yes, some robots are very smart and can be single visits that appear to be normal people. Analytics does a pretty good job at making them obvious though.
This makes sense, but not entirely. My other statistics shows bot visits. Bots don’t visit hundreds or thousands of times per day – or even daily. When I compare stats from link clicks from Twitter, FB, etc… they match the Blogger stats, not Google Analytics. When my posts go somewhat viral (example: 70,000 hits in 8 hours) and GA shows I had 0 hits – that’s bots?
This is extremely useful. Short and precise.
I observed the similar thing with my blog where the blogger stats differ from the Google Analytics stats.
Would love to soon write a post on this.
My google search “Blogger statistics and google analytics are different” landed me here and I’m satisfied with your thorough answer.
Thanks!