Difference Piwik / Google Analytics

Hello,

User of PhpmyVisites in several sites, I tried to use Piwik and GG Analytics on a same new website.
Last week I had:

visits: 550 for Piwik vs 301 in Google Analytics.
unique visitors: 507 Piwik vs 222 in GGA
pages views: 1216 Piwik vs 1259 in GGA

I don’t understand why there is a so important difference I never had with PhpmyVisites.
Have you got any idea?

Thanks and see you soon.
WBM

are you using the latest Piwik version? Please do a new test with 0.2.37, make sure all pages are tagged with both, and let us know the results.

I also having the same issue,
GA show me that - Absolute Unique Visitors 8,030
But piwik show value - 1,434 unique visitors.

[quote=ichigoni @ Aug 10 2010, 08:45 AM]I also having the same issue,
GA show me that - Absolute Unique Visitors 8,030
But piwik show value - 1,434 unique visitors.[/quote]

Hello

I also found the same difference as you.

Over the same period (half day), GA accounts 6 visits of France while Piwik accounts 4 visits of France and 1 of U.S. (for information my site is brand new;))

I use Piwik 1.0.0.

Can someone explain this difference, then, numbers of visits, but also location?

Thank you in advance for your help

The same is happening to our sites too. Is there any specific place to put the code? I tried with the js code in the head, after body tag openinig and before body tag close with the same results. Piwik stats are really low comparing with google analytics.

Single day results.

Site 1:
Piwik: 40703 visits, 32145 unique
Google: 112312 visits, 78155 unique

Site 2:
Piwik: 1562 visits, 1521 unique
Google: 3902 visits, 3834 unique.

These are huge differences. I even disabled the “Do not Track” but nothing changed.

Such huge diffenres are generally caused by:

  • JS error on some pages causing piwik to fail
  • Forgot to put the code on some pages

I’m 100% sure that the code exist on all pages. Checked it many times.
So any js error would make piwik fail ? Wouldn’t that break google analytics code too?

Edit:

Checked the sites pages and the only messages in browser’s console are some blocked google frames and some 400(bad request) for google ads.
No javascript exceptions or errors.

We have inlcude piwik on some smaller sites with very small traffic ( between 100 and 300 hits per day ) but the differences with google are reasonable ( piwik numbers are slightly smaller ).

when you have big differences, try to see if some pages are not tracked, or maybe some “browserS” are not tracked (indicating potential JS/browser bug), etc.

One method i find helps to identify some surprisingly untagged pages is the following:

Pick a 24 hr period day recently past. Do a pages report in piwik on that day and do one in GA for the same period.

You will then have 2 lists to compare to each other. This will help identify pages one or the other have missed, problems with etc.

If after the 2 lists are compared you dont find any real surprises then let us know the results to see if anyone on the boards has any ideas.

regards

I do get a huge difference between GA stats and Piwik stats too.

There is something like +30% on all GA indicators compared to Piwik indicators, unless for direct traffic which is 3 times higher on Piwik.

I read on other posts on the subject “GA vs Piwik” that this difference could only be explained by robot’s trafic count (suposing that the tracking code is correct on every page)

…anyway, can you explain why the direct trafic is higher on Piwik reports ??

Thanks
Florian

Have you disabled DoNotTrack ?

Hi Matt,

Do you mean the iframe in attachment to propose the user not to be tracked ?

… I’m not sure to understand the link with direct trafic, can you please make it more clear for me ?

Thanks
Florian

I notice in the visitor logs that an average 50% of the direct trafic lines have a visitDuration = 0

How can it be ?

Moreover, more or less 25% of that traffic (visitDuration=0) has a providerUrl = General - Analytics Platform - Matomo
What does it means ??
O_o

Sorry if this post doesn’t fit here. I’ve been looking for and I think that this thread fits with my question (:P)

Do you recommend using Piwik for locating the backlinks that Google analytics doesn’t show now when you are visited by a user logged in? (the “not provided” backlinks)

Thank you all.