[quote=Valkum]
Some modern Browsers can send an Do Not Track header, that implies that the users wish is not to be be tracked.
Piwik accepts this header, GA not. (As i know) But thats configurable in Piwik.[/quote]
If this is the case piwik should have more data right ?
I guess the point is not about stating that one is more accurate than the other. The point is about understanding the rules making each one specific. Then anyone is free to decide if these rules are good or not.
As Piwik is open I would love having a clear state of rules related to main metrics. I beleive the code is the documentation, but sometimes it does help having this rules in a more human format. e.g.:
On the GA side, having the same rules from GA would be nice (or at least some guesses). Plus we can still compare our values on the metric level: providing percents and the tracker method used. If you can’t disclose absolute numbers as I do, just mention your are above 10k visits / day.
Here are my numbers compared to GA yesterday:
Tracking method:
Once again my point is not about tweaking Piwik to be closer to GA but to understand what make each one specific.
I’ve been looking into things that might cause discrepancies between piwik and google analytics also, though I recently realized all the differences are in keword counts not visitors or page views. The two things I’d investigated were:
My google analytics code is in the head sections of the html and piwik instructs you to add the code before the closing body tag. If your front page loads slowly and visitors click on a link or leave before the page completes loading the visit might be recorded by analytics and missed by piwik. I’m not sure how many sites actually load slow enough for that to happen though. You could try inserting the piwik javascript at the top of the page right ofter the opening body tag.
Another thing you could check is see if there are any html errors that might interfere with the piwik javascript being processed correctly. There could be a glitch in your html code above the piwik code that could prevent it from being processed correctly.
These are kind of long shots but worth checking out.
Hi Nicolas,
You are right. If we could have rules of calculation and recording then we would understand differences. Maybe it’s in a documentation but i did not find it
Google Analytics will track “offline” views of your pages.
For example, someone can view your page in their browser’s cache, or a saved copy, and it may show up in Google analytics even though they did not touch your server and so did not show up in your server logs.
Theoretically, I suppose Piwik could do the same thing. But I have not noticed it doing so. It seems unlikely this would account for the size of the discrepancy noted by the OP, but that might depend on the content, cache settings, and user base.