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I'm tracking a client website with both Google Analytics and New Relic. There's a bit of discrepency between the browser usage though (i think).

Google Analytics reports Chrome as top used browser, followed by IE with almost half number of sessions:

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New Relic doesn't have a comparative metric, but it reports 1.6 times higher throughput for IE than Chrome:

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I understand that "number of sessions" and "pages per minute" by browser are not directly comparable: sessions are recorded only after ga script is fully loaded and throughput includes requests by bots or some non-user-accountable hits.

But besides that, could there be another explanation for such a high IE throughput? If throughput for IE is so high, it should be either due to high number of sessions or pages/session, but both of which are lower compared to Chrome (according to GA).

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  • The only thing I can think of is that Google Analytics is spammed quite a lot. These spam sessions can severely skew the analytics. – closetnoc Jan 23 '17 at 18:57
  • @closetnoc I get a fair bit of 301 IIS-redirects from an old domain to this new domain; could it be that new relic counts these redirects as IE hits? – Md Oliya Jan 24 '17 at 9:03
  • I have no idea. Sorry. – closetnoc Jan 24 '17 at 15:39
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New Relic Browser filters out bots (crawlers), but includes Synthetic traffic. New Relic counts unique sessions differently than Google Analytics. Both New Relic Browser & Google Analytics make other assumptions and support certain browser APIs, which can all vary from each other.

In other words, there is no standard and it would be very unlikely that the products match each other. They are both right, for what they intend to measure, with the assumptions they've made.

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