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For a couple of months I've got a Wordpress website (http://www.tricky-design.com) online. I was curious how many visitor do visit my website therefore I'd setup a statistics counter Statpress (plugin wordpress).

After a while I came across Google analytics an thought, why not use this one instead, so I've installed it too.

My hosting provider also does offer me limited statistics but the strange thing is that the results of the three different counter over the same time span aren't the same. I've placed the results in the table below.

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| DECEMBER 2011                     |
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| Source    | Hits | Pages | Unique |
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| Hosting:  | 5903 |   751 |   1087 |
| Google:   |  263 |   145 |    132 |
| Statpress:|  858 |   291 |    ??? |
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As you can see the differences are big. Does anyone know how this is possible? I don't know which one of the 3 I can trust or is at least close to the actual numbers.

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  • This doesn't seem like a programming question, as such, and may be better suited for webmasters.se or serverfault.
    – peachykeen
    Jan 2, 2012 at 19:43
  • Can you give some more details about what kind of tracking your hosting provider offers? It's most likely able to track people with JavaScript disabled or Google Analytics blocked (but the difference shouldn't be that big)... ;)
    – mobweb
    Jan 2, 2012 at 19:44

3 Answers 3

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As explained in part by Google's "Why don't my web logs or third-party click auditing software match my AdWords report?" support article, Google AdWords and Google Analytics do not track traffic in the same way that WordPress or your web server logs will report.

Your host may be presenting you with data for all requests, including JavaScript files, CSS files, images, etc. Google Analytics won't track these sorts of requests, only actual pages on your site. Thus, a single pageview might be 5-10 (or more) "hits" on a server-side Apache log parser.

StatPress appears to be server-side built into WordPress. It's likely not excluding no-JS clients like search engine spiders, whereas Google Analytics does.

I'd go with the Google Analytics numbers once you've confirmed that it's installed correctly on all your pages.

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Do all of your pages contain the hosting, google, and statpress code? It is possible that some visitors use browser addons, privacy proxies, or RSS readers that don't trigger the google or statpress code. The hosting provider has access to the raw server logs, so their data is probably the most complete

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Your "Hosting" seems to be tracking bots. These are excluded in Goolge Analytics count. Trust Goolge Analytics.

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