Analytics: Whose Report shall I believe

xm1

In my vanilla dashboard, vanilla statistics reports 27,000 page views from 16 Aug. to 16 Sept, while Google analytics reports 4,000 in the exact same time frame.

My question is, does any one here understand the difference between these two analytics. Or is it that one is correct and the other is not. If so whose report should I believe.

River

http://docs.vanillaforums.com/help/addons/statistics/

they might be reporting two different things.

look at the apache or other web server logs if you have one and you will probably have a third "Watch" that tells you even another stat.

http://www.awstats.org/

https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/how-to-collect-nginx-metrics/

not sure if this is of any help.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1042498

xm1

Thanks for your reply @River,

According the link you provided, 'Sampling occurs automatically when more than 500k sessions (100M for Analytics 360) are collected for a report, allowing Analytics to generate reports more quickly for those large data sets.'

I don't think my forum has such high numbers.

My question still remains, which one of these analytics should be relied on? For someone like me who just know what my total page views are.

River

@xm1 said:

Thanks for your reply @River,
My question still remains, which one of these analytics should be relied on? For someone like me who just know what >my total page views are.

I wouldn't rely on either of them!

I don't have an answer, and unless you get a staff answer from the staff that are intimately familiar with the proprietary code from both google and vanilla, most answers would be most likely unreliable or assumptions as well. I repeat, the only people who can tell you what the analytics really do, are the ones who actually see the source code and gave you an answer based on looking at the proprietary code. Any other answer you get is a guess, and just as likely a wrong guess.

You can be the best judge, analyze your server log. and throw out the robot crawlers from your stats.
if you use apache, you can use awstats, if you use another web server there are probably other pieces of software to analyse your server logs. Then after you get a baseline from the other software, you can interpolate to see which of the two analytics programs you mention should be believed or relied upon.

you can total up the view counts for each discussion, which would actually tell you what people might be reading rather than ignoring unless you care about wall activity and viewing of profile pages. It seems like the thing somone might be most concerned about on a discussion forum is the viewing of discussions, instead of ancillary parts.

this plugin is probably as reliable as the view count number for each discussion and just a summation.
https://vanillaforums.org/addon/statisticsfooter-plugin

xm1

Thanks again @River for your reply. You've been helpful.