Google Analytics

Tizzard

I was asked to look at our referrals from a particular website that we advertise on. .

Overall total came up as 137 from October 2010 (when they first put our details on their website)


I was then asked to do a break down by month for the period – and when I totted up the overall total - it came up with 42 more - Making a cod out of me….

I checked and re-checked and the discrepency still occurs....

Would it be fair to say that information taken from Google Analytics is not “scientifically” accurate???

I have to try and explain this without looking like an idiot...

Axwell

Where did the original figure of 137 come from?

I find Analytics to be pretty accurate to be honest, it depends how you are filtering the information to get the figures to be fair.

antoinolachtnai

The problem here is probably people returning, i.e, they visited once in January and once in February. For a few months taken together, this is regarded as one unique visitor. However, for each individual month it is also one unique visitor within each month.

Tizzard

Thank you very much - I should have copped that myself!!

antoinolachtnai

Well, read through the documentation yourself and confirm that, but I think that's the cause.

You could send the guy the screenshots just so he can see for himself.

PaulPinnacle

Tizzard wrote: »

Thank you very much - I should have copped that myself!!

Were the figures you gave "Unique Visitors" or "Visits"?

Reading the query, I assumed you were speaking about 'Visits'.

Visits is based on unique sessions when viewing your site (e.g. timeout of a session after 30 mins) and won't be distorted like Unique Visitors, which utilises persistent cookies and will compare the cookie identifiers to produce the 'unique' figures for a given timeframe. In this case, when using 'Visits', the monthly figures should provide an accurate total when aggregated over a matching period.

If your numbers are for "Unique Visitors" then the explanation given, that unique visitor figures will vary depending on the timeframe being looked at, is correct.

digitalnative

Hi Folks

I have a quick re:question the location reports in Google Analytics. For my website I am seeing quite a bit of traffic outside of Ireland, Russia for example. But I've read that although it shows Russia, that traffic might not be necessarily based in Russia?
Something to do with the location of the IP address?

I'm a bit confused so I'd be grateful if someone could help me.

Regards

Digital_Guy

digitalnative wrote: »

Hi Folks

I have a quick re:question the location reports in Google Analytics. For my website I am seeing quite a bit of traffic outside of Ireland, Russia for example. But I've read that although it shows Russia, that traffic might not be necessarily based in Russia?
Something to do with the location of the IP address?

I'm a bit confused so I'd be grateful if someone could help me.

Regards

Could be a proxy server for some traffic, but most likely what you are seeing is spam traffic from Russia. If your site is new then a large percentage of your traffic may actually be spam referrals.

Trojan

Agreed.

A relatively new spam technique is "referrer spam" - spambots visit a site with a fake referring URL of the site they want you to visit.

Check the Referrals report in Google Analytics. You might see referring URLs like "buttons-for-your-website-here.co" (that's not a real one, I'm not giving them a link).

If you do have these, you can block them with a GA custom advanced filter - there's blog posts and videos that will show you how to do that.

_Brian

It's spam, you can set up filters to ignore it from the real numbers.