Why are my website statistics different from Google Analytics’?

Genkgo websites have built in statistics. The graphs that are created bases on these statistics can differ from the statistics in Google Analytics. Why does this happen?

How does Genkgo gather statistics?

All requests that are made to a web page of a Genkgo website are saved in a database that is specialized in big data. Before this happens, the visits to web pages are filtered. Visits by robots are not saved because robots create more traffic than people. If Genkgo had to save these results as well, we would soon need much more hardware to save all data. From a business point of view, this would mean that we incur a lot of expenses for something that doesn’t bring in any money. Besides, who is interested in how many robots visit a website?

Robots are identified based on their User-Agent string they send with each visit. A User-Agent is the name of the program they use to browse the internet. This also tells us which browser (Chrme, Firefox, Safari, Edge etc.) was used. This is how we know that the user was a robot.

What is a unique visitor according to Genkgo?

Each visit generates a so-called fingerprint. This is a collection of unique properties of a visitor. A visitor is uniqe according to Genkgo when they have their own IP address and User-Agent. This method isn’t perfect. Google Analytics can better distinguish who is and isn’t unique because they use a different method. With Genkgo’s method, all students in a student residence can be viewed as the same user, whereas Google Analytics can distinguish them separate, unique persons.

How is Google Analytics’ method different from Genkgo’s?

We refere to Google itself for the method they use to distinguish unique users. The only difference we can mention is that Genkgo gathers data based on requests to web pages, and Google Analytics gathers data based on requests on web pages.

So why are the statistics different?

In short: we don’t know exactly why. Genkgo’s intenton is to give our clients a idea of the progression of visits. Genkgo is in no way specialized in this area. We spent time making this functionality only once, and later made several improvements. Google Analytics has people working on the program daily. For Google, this program is one of their greatest sources of income because they can link it to their advertisement program Googld AdWords. We can’t and won’t compete with such programs. Therefore, it is possible that Google Analytics gives better insight into the visitor statistics.

The only thing we can do, is being open about our methodology. We give some suggestions as to why the number of unique visitors could be higher according to Google Analytics. Other than that, we leave it to the discretion of the customer.