Wordpress stat and google Analytics mismatch | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Trust analytics, don't trust the word press plugin.  They have never matched for us but i'll take Google's opinion

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

Here are some reasons why they are different -

 

Wordpress stats measure only page views. Google measures everything, so if you are looking at the first screen in GA vs WS, WS would be a lot more. 

GA is cookie based, so if the visitor has cookies disabled you won't record that visitor.

(I don't remember which one, but one of them) don't count PDFs, word docs as pages… if you have them.

WS sometimes counts the bots as visitors, GA is much cleverer in this area.

If your site is slow, it will take time for google analytics to load, so if the visitor leaves before the GA code loads, it won't be recorded but WS would have recorded it.

 

Pick one, GA is much much reliable so if it were me I would pick that, and stick with it. 

That's interesting that GA is cookie based.  I had no idea!  Good to know about the importance of site speed for GA too.  Never thought about speed from a GA perspective but makes sense.  Hopefully none of our sites will ever be slow enough to lose readers!