Why is Google analytics only showing 10% of my traffic?

I have given it 2 months to kick in now, but Google analytics is only showing 10% of my traffic from all sources, and less of traffic over all.
When I compare it to awstats which is on my server, and different external stats from social networking sites and such, it is apparent that every other monitoring source cannot be over inflating them together.
Has anyone else encountered this, and should I just dump the program all together.

 

I have also noticed this; sometimes it reports just 2-3 visitors to some of my sites. But I am sure more visited.

 

You have to put the analytics code in each one of the pages you want tracked, maybe you didn´t do that.

 

You have to put it on every page!!???
WTF? I have over 7000 pages indexed, how am I supposed to do that?

 

You have to put the analytics code on every page on your site (that you want to be tracked). You obviously can't put it in cached pages.

 

What kind of site is it? Maybe you have a common footer or some other file present in all pages.

 

I have it on a word press blog, I just dumped it in the header. I guess that's not good enough.
I always used awstats, I just thought I would check out analytics, now I want to see it work.

 

Well if ur header file remains static across all pages, it doesnt require you to add to each page.

It would be impossible to add code manually for every new page. This is for old non-CMS based HTML pages only.

 

Analytics also requires visitors to have javascript turned on..

if people turn it off when browsing then analytics will also not know about their visit

 

be aware that google analytics does not update in realtime

 

I also noticed that Google analytics shows 10times less visitors than my server stats. I don't think that existing of code on each page helps in this case. The visitors are counted only if it comes. The code on each page helps only to know how many pages the user visits.

 

The problem is most of us put Google analytics code in our footer

A hit does n't get noticed on analytics when the footer takes time to load or the user clicks on the another internal or external link in the website before google analytics code loads


Also another point is some times I have seen some websites with Google analytics loads slowly than the other websites!

 

Yeah thats true, but google does recommend it their although I have put it higher in the code and it works too.

 

Personally, I believe as long as you keep the data for a while, then the actual numbers themselves aren't as important as the comparison of figures within an analytics program so you are comparing like with like. However if you are reporting to a boss/client, then those numbers become significantly more important.

GA only will report visitors activity of visitors with JS on, and you have to accept inherent problems with tracking on a "stateless" web such as cookies being deleted and IP address changed.

Google Analytics vs AWstats with regards to home page traffic:
http://web.uwaterloo.ca/documentation/AnalyticsvLogReader.php


http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-reliable-is-google-analytics
talk about the differences between server logs and GA.

Analytics shootout:
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/analytics-report-may-2007.shtml
has data from a variety of analytics programs for comparison.

 

Mine is pretty accurate & the stats it gives me is amazing.

Since I use .NET, I just put the code in my masterpage & it's used on automatically on all my pages.

You have to put it on all your pages for the stats to be accurate.

 

All very helpful. Very helpful, thanks guys.
Yes the comparison numbers are most important, but with it showing so little, it's kinda like checking Alexa for stats.
I'll just leave it on to get a basic over view.

 

is there any difference for the page impressions?

 

Yes. It's a new blog, but awstats shows around 3200 page impressions a day, and Google analytics shows around 40.

I was wondering, can I install the code in the root, and get more accurate readings?

 

I had the same problem and it ended up being that javascript must be enabled for analytics to work.

 

if you are using wordpress then put the analytics code in the footer...It works for me....analytics is great for me...I use awstats, statcounter and analytics and they all show relatively similar data..

Analytics is great for archiving and showing you trends over time