[MWP]

Apologies if this is in the wrong section. I have a website with 1&1 and there seems to be a discrepancy between the 1&1 analytics and Google Analytics. Anyone know why this might be or encountered it before. I thought maybe 1&1 are padding up their results to look better, but then maybe Google aren't as accurate as it's an outside application?? The results I am getting are these.

Google : 24/07/11 - 23/08/11 = 74 visits with a bounce rate of 41.89%
1&1 : 27/07/11 - 23/08/22 = 686 visits and can't find the bounce rate. This also shows 370 odd visits from SE bots (mainly Google) but even taking that into consideration it still leaves 300 visitors compared to Google's recorded 74. That is a massive difference or am I being a plonker Rodney???

Also on a side note, am I right in thinking that backlinks won't show on checkers or programmes like Web CEO until the backlinking site is crawled?

Many thanks.

[daveb]

Your 1&1 stats will be based on the server log files at 1&1 whereas Google analytics reports data based on javascript running in a browser.

Depending on your site audience that can potential lead to huge differences hence it's always best to use not both server logs, AND Google analytics to get a good understanding of traffic and visitor behaviour.

[cibgraphics]

are you confusing page views with unique visitors?

[rallport]

cibgraphics, on 24 August 2011 - 07:54 PM, said:

are you confusing page views with unique visitors?

Yer I second that, as the OP has a big discrepancy - there will always be a discrepancy but the OP's is very large.

[MWP]

According to 1&1 it says that all page impressions from one computer are aggregated into 1 visit. It also says that the data could be inaccurate if my site is being looked at in a cyber cafe as it only registers one visit per ip address. So going by that, that would mean that 700 different ip address have visited my site? My page impressions as of this morning show 1,441 according to 1&1?

[V7HOST]

I would think that google analytics is more reliable. Also is Google analytics may only be monitoring visitors to your main page(i.e. your home page) while 1&1 is monitoring all page views(i.e your whole website)?

[Dcruize]

Some people block analytics, that might make up a few more hits. Analytics is a very useful tool, but I've been stung by it in the past and I'm getting more paranoid about using it all the time.

[richardtj]

Analytics doesn't track bots, which will totally skew pageview results. The hosting package will include every bot that visits the site and probably doesn't even track IP's so if someone drops a connection and then reconnects, that'll be seen as a seperate visit. Stick with Google Analytics, it's going to give you pretty much spot on results (as long as Java is enabled). There's thousands of bots out there, which really skew a hosts results.