Comparing Vanilla stats to Google Analytics

LeftBrain

Last week I had a spike in my traffic according to the stats in the Vanilla dashboard. I was curious to get more information so I went to my Google Analytics account to see where that traffic may have come from. But in Google Analytics, there was no corresponding traffic spike.

Does anyone know why Vanilla traffic stats are different from Google Analytic traffic stats?

How might one investigate Vanilla stats to get a better sense of user behavior?

thanks

Perry, 44

phreak

@LeftBrain: I run several OS forums for many years. Vanilla Stats and Google Analytics are often far away from each other. It's a known issue that Vanilla Stats sometimes misreports just over some days, sometimes weeks and I also have boards were sync is out of anything for years. Curiously this can also affect pretty clear database values like registered users. 🤷‍♂️

LeftBrain

Thanks for the information. I suppose the Google data is better than the Vanilla info.

charrondev

Google analytics is definitely better when looking at our open source product.

We have a much more robust proprietary analytics plugin, but it has external service requirements and is something we sell for our cloud platform.

Even with our proprietary analytics they are used more for tracking forum specific interactions than general view stats.

Analytics is a core competency from google, and they also track people all across the internet (and have people using their browser). I’m not particularly surprised that their tracking is more robust then ours.