It’s not uncommon for the number of visitors measured on a server to differ from the statistics in Google Analytics. At first glance, this may seem strange, but there are several reasons behind it. In this article, we explain where these discrepancies come from.
The fact that there is a difference between the numbers in your Google Analytics dashboard and those from your web host is not suspicious. On the contrary, it’s completely normal. At 2manydots, we see the same with our own website statistics, and our other clients experience this as well.
The difference in the numbers lies in the definition each party uses and the way measured visitors are recorded. Each has a different purpose for the data. Google Analytics aims to map user behavior as accurately as possible, while the hosting provider wants to calculate costs as fairly as possible. So, what exactly is a visitor?
1. What is a visitor according to the server (hosting provider)?
Websites are accessed in many different ways. There are visitors who click away before the page fully loads—the notorious bounce—but also people who browse through dozens of pages. Then there are bots: automated visits from, for example, search engines that index your site.
A hosting provider registers every unique IP address within a 24-hour period as a unique visitor. On one hand, this can lower the visitor count, for example, when two computers from the same company visit your site on the same day. On the other hand, the server also counts brief visits and constant check-ins (pings) from uptime monitoring services. These, too, generate data traffic, which leads to costs for the hosting provider.
2. What is a visitor according to Google Analytics?
Google Analytics aims to focus on real, human visitors. Bots are, as much as possible, identified and excluded from the statistics. Similarly, Google doesn’t count filtered data, such as visitors from countries other than the Netherlands or visitors from your own company.
Another key difference is that Google Analytics considers visits unique if they come from different browsers, even if they share the same IP address. For example, a visit from Google Chrome on a laptop followed 15 minutes later by a visit from Safari on a smartphone would be counted as two unique visitors by Google Analytics, even though they come from the same network (IP address).
One of the key features of the chosen hosting package is bandwidth: the amount of traffic that can pass through the connection. Every time someone or something accesses your website, the server transmits data over the connection, even if it’s just a bounce or a bot. The hosting provider categorizes all this traffic under the term billable visits.
It makes sense that hosting providers charge a higher fee to a multinational company, which uses a lot of bandwidth, compared to a local plumber whose website barely attracts any visitors. That’s why the various hosting packages are not only categorized by storage space but also by the number of measured visitors.
The difference between the numbers from Google Analytics and your hosting provider is therefore easy to explain. Even short and non-human visits generate costs for the hosting provider, while Google Analytics considers it “unfair” to register these. This is why it’s common for the hosting provider to report higher visitor numbers than Google Analytics.
Message from Hosting Partner:
The number of visitors in Google Analytics is always going to be considerably lower. The reason being is Google Analytics tries very hard to provide information only on human visitors that matter for ad traffic and will not include any visitors that have JavaScript disabled on their browsers. A unique IP is counted as unique in an entire month, while our system looks at unique IPs on a per day basis. They also will not include Google bots or various other bots in their visitors count. While we include them, we don’t charge for bot visits, they are comped and are not part of the calculation for overages. Google Analytics is used for marketing/advertising purposes and that is why it works so hard to only count what they believe to be human visitors. Our server stats monitoring tracks all unique visitors because from a server impact standpoint, a bot or a human is still pulling data down from the server and using CPU resources in the process.
