Is Google Analytics Accurate?

Question

My records show a particular page of my web site was visited 609 times between July 2 and November 15.

Google Analytics reports only 238 page views during that time.

Answer 1

Probably crawlers. Our website was being hit every couple of hours by robots.

Answer 2

Given the time stamp of the last comment, I thought I'd leave an update here; Google Analytics recently announced they'd let people opt-out of Google Analytics, on the user-side, meaning if you didn't want website owners to track your movements, you could effectively become invisible on sites that are measured by Google Analytics. this could further offset your data points. in a sep thread, I suggested running two web analytics tools (many free to choose from) to measure against each other.

Answer 3

It is not, many visitors have javascript turned of or have the customize google firefox extension installed.

Answer 4

Could the rest of the page views be from crawlers - either Googlebot or others?

Answer 5

Are you positive the site is working properly in all browsers? I've seen analytics thrown off by pages that fail to render properly in Firefox but work fine in IE, and vice versa.

Answer 6

http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=55614