Posted by pkcho on May 19, 2010 at 3:38am
I have the Administration menu installed on my site and have been comparing the numbers shown for the "anonymous/authenticated" users on the menu bar to the Google Analytics numbers, and they don't match up.
Sometimes, the Administration Menu shows that there are 300+ anonymous users on the site, and that is completely different from Google, which shows a much lower number over the course of the day. I wish those numbers were true, but I tend to believe Google's at this point.
Can someone explain what those numbers are tracking?
I have included a screenshot of my Administration menu. The numbers are on the right.
Thank you.
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Comments
Google's tracking is
Google's tracking is JavaScript-based, which excludes automated robots (like Google's own search engine crawler bots). Administration Menu presumably is including those bots.
Thank you for your reply. Is
Thank you for your reply.
Is it safe to say that Google's tracking tracks user interaction more accurately? Or, is there the possibility that Google misses some types of actual transactions in the process due to this method?
There are a bunch of ways to track what visitors are doing.
Google's tracking does a pretty decent job (actually for our purposes, a great job) at tracking where users click (so long as they are links to internal links - you have to do some setup work if you want it to track outgoing links). It won't necessarily track everything (like bots as they do not enable javascript or users that have javascript disabled). You can use software like awstats or webalizer to log anything requested on your site as they look at your site's log files (though it will track bots and they may not be what you are after). You can find a fairly decent discussion on usage of Google Analytics / AWStats at http://www.webmasterworld.com/analytics/3227679.htm (though the article is a little old ;))
At our workplace, we have been experimenting with the click_heatmap module to see where users click on our pages (for now, only testing against the home page of our IT website). We have seen some interesting results about content users absolutely don't click for and links users click to. Its also helped us gauge on likely areas that users do not bother reading (so the site will be going through some fair revisions down the line).
Thank you for your reply.
I'll definitely look into your suggestion further.