A site of mine recently started ranking reasonably high in Google for a pretty common, everyday word. The site is currently at the top of page 4 in the SERPs. Pretend the word is "foo". Last month 922 searches for "foo" (just that one word, not including phrases like "foo bar") resulted in visits to my site according to AWstats. According to Google Analytics however, only 5 searches for the word "foo" resulted in visits to my site for the same time period. (The Analytics code was on my site the whole month, and I'm seeing a similar pattern emerging this month.) Has anybody else experienced similarly huge discrepencies between Analytics and other stats programs regarding search terms? At first I thought AWstats must be wrong, but given the reasonably high ranking in Google's SERPs, I feel like it's Analytics that's off somehow. Could Analytics be THAT wrong? Or is it at all likely that even with that relatively high ranking in Google, I only get about 5 visits a month from searches on that common word? (Approximate search volume for the word in June was 11,100,000 according to the AdWords Keyword Tool.) Something seems really wrong here, but maybe I'm just being ignorant about the numbers and metrics. Please educate me if so. Thanks.
Different stats programs will often report different data, however, if you're getting such a large discrepancy, I'd take ShamsiOwnz advice and contact google.
I have heard that other stat programs can over inflate numbers.. but yours are a bit over the top... Might pay to check that you Analytics code is set right on all pages.. http://sitescanga.com/ Cheers James
For one of my sites I am seeing a huge discrepancy. I have quite a bit of other javascript code on some of these pages and think it may be this. I have moved it about a bit to see if it makes any difference. You may want to try and move the analytics code to the top of your html code if it isn't already.
Thanks for the thoughts and suggestions, guys. Tattoos, special thanks for the SiteScan link. It revealed a couple careless errors on my part. While the errors found so far don't explain this particular problem, I'm now more inclined to believe it's most likely my fault and I'm going to thoroughly check my implementation. My apologies to Google...
I experience similar problems on my sites - Analytics shows about half the visitors AWStats does. I've had similar advice to that given by gford - move the Analytics code to the top of the page so that if a page isn't completely loaded, the Analytics code is more likely to be executed. This didn't make any difference to the figures. The only other reason I can think of for the discrepancy is that maybe Google is better at filtering out robots and scrapers than AWStats and so doesn't count some of the visits AWStats does.
I am thinking that the Analytics is logging only the pages that you have the code copy&pasted, while the AWstats is logging for your whole site.