Why Did My Traffic Numbers Drop With Google Analytics?

Many small business owners get alarmed when they install Google Analytics for the first time and get a look at their traffic numbers. Especially if they’ve been using another metrics package.

Some blogging systems come with a proprietary analytics tool, but the problem with many of these tracking systems is in the way that they track traffic and visitors. It isn’t necessarily accurate. Some of them purposely record visits by bots and spiders so that it appears that your traffic stats are higher than they actually are. That’s why we prefer to use Google Analytics because you get a more realistic picture of your traffic counts.

The big difference in the way traffic stats are measured boils down to whether the analytics package is cookie-based or IP address-based. If your analytics tool measures traffic using IP addresses then it is likely tracking visits by search engine spiders and other bots. Every time a competitor lands on your site with a spybot or a search engine spider visits your pages to crawl it for indexing purposes you could be registering a visit, reflecting an inaccurate real person count of your traffic. A more accurate way to measure traffic is with a cookie-based analytics tool like Google Analytics.

Since robots and spiders don’t carry cookies, they won’t be counted in a cookie-based analytics package. The downside to this is if a real person visitor to your site has their browser cookies disabled then they won’t be counted as a visit either. Fortunately, most people don’t disable their browser cookies so that doesn’t happen as often as you’d imagine. Besides, it’s much better to under-report your traffic numbers than to over-report them.