Hi, I just want to ask if its possible that the Google analytics stats on our site is inflated. Right now Google Analytics is reporting something like 250K pageviews per month, yet our Alexa ranking is just somewhere in 200K. Yes, I know that Alexa is inaccurate but I'm a bit concern on the analytics end as well. The reason for that is because I just realized today that the G.A. tracking code has been placed on each and every of our page. I don't know but, the ideal is to place it in just one page right? preferably index.php? Feel free to let me know your opinions. I'm worried that the stats is telling me the wrong story.
alexa is wildly inaccurate, dont get your stats from there imo, if you are wary of analytics use another tool as well for stats but not alexa
yeah, thats what I did now. i guess i should've done that a long time ago so i can have a good summary of the average visitors by now..
... but putting your Google tags on every page is correct. You don't want it just on index.php. maybe make sure it is only on each page once. Not sure what the impact would be if its on a page twice - for example in index.php and maybe an include like footer.php - it night count it twice (or not at all if it causes javascript errors)
As well as Alexa being untrustworthy, you should also note that pageviews aren't the best way to estimate the number of visitors.
You absolutely want to have Analytics on every page.. otherwise your bounce rate will always be 100% because it will count your subpages as outside pages! (As in, if someone navigates from index.html to salespage.html, it will count them as leaving your site). Also you won't be able to track peoples' paths through your site using content analysis. Google Analytics is not perfect, but I think it will always have a more correct set of data than Alexa.
Yea, thanks guys for your inputs. I think what made our traffic inflated is that the analytics code has been placed on some pages for multiple times. but its ok now.