This guide explains why you may have discrepancies across your statistics if comparing from the Analytics Dashboard to Google Analytics.
Update November 2018: Please note that the Dashboard is now referred to as Analytics and is available from the 'View' menu within the reading list.
Introduction
Sometimes when you are looking at your statistics you may notice that there is a discrepancy between the Dashboard figures and what Google Analytics is telling you. We would expect to see a fairly consistent 10-15% difference between the page-view counts in the reading list Analytics Dashboard and Google Analytics.
Background
Dashboard figures
Our Dashboard data comes directly from our server access logs. Every time anything hits/communicates with our servers it produces a log line in the access log file - this file then gets whittled down to exclude anything which does not look like a genuine human request for a page. All the logs we are getting - after applying the exclusions - now looks like genuine human hits.
Google Analytics figures
The Google Analytics data is collected by us adding a js widget onto the pages which will fire off an event to Google from the user’s browser every time a page is loaded. There are many places where this stat could fail:
- the JavaScript could crash,
- the user may be behind a firewall blocking the requests,
- the user may have a poor connection,
- the user may have installed some anti-tracking plugins to their browser.
As a result it is unlikely that Google will have as complete a log of all accesses to lists as we do.
Conclusion
The conclusion is that we believe our stats to be correct and a 10-15% difference between our stats and GA is expected.
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