When you run an online store, analyzing results is essential to establishing an ongoing strategy and growing your business. To view our eCommerce statistics we have two channels: our eCommerce platform and tracking services such as Google Analytics. So far so good, but when we compare the statistics from both channels we see that the data don’t match, and that services like Analytics generally show lower numbers than the server’s own statistics. Why does this happen? In this post we explain the reasons.
The main reason is that tracking services such as Analytics are stricter in how they define a visitor, since they must do everything possible to ensure no visitor is recorded twice and only human clicks count as visits.
Keep in mind too that tracking services are external, so they don’t run on the same infrastructure as our platform. This can mean that data communications between external services and our own can occasionally fail and show different data.
Once we understand these two basic premises behind the differences in our statistics, we need to consider other factors that can cause the data not to match. Keep reading!
Ad blockers and tracking blockers
The first thing to consider is the well-known AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Ghostery and similar extensions that block tracking services. Some internet users, especially frequent desktop users, reject mass online advertising, so a significant number of users run ad blockers and you lose some of the users you could reach.
Besides blocking ads, some users also use methods to prevent the websites they visit and use from tracking them or their activity. This is done through a header (DNT) that users can enable in their web browser; the feature is available in the most popular modern browsers but has to be switched on manually.
Finally, another reason we don’t get accurate data on our tracking server is cookies, or rather, not having them. Cookies matter because they are used to tag a visitor and aggregate that visitor’s behavior across multiple visits. For tracking services to track a visitor, the visitor must accept a cookie; if they accept it and it isn’t blocked or deleted, the total visitor count will stay relatively low. Otherwise, if someone constantly deletes cookies, they will be counted as a new “unique” visitor on each subsequent visit, despite being the same user.
Bots and non-human activity
A very notable difference between tracking services and your own platform is that the former may use different measures from our system to filter out non-human traffic, such as crawlers and bots.
Crawlers and bots are programs sent by search engines to find and document every page on the internet. This means platforms like LogiCommerce may record more visits than tracking services. Search engines also crawl based on a site’s popularity, so the more popular your website and the larger your catalog (SKUs), the more often search engine robots will visit it.
The tracking code
One factor that affects data collection is the tracking code of the external service we use, such as Google Analytics. The points below are human errors, so we can fix them to get statistics closer to reality.
The first possible mistake is in where the tracking code is placed, such as not adding it to every page of the website: if users interact with those pages, they won’t show up in Analytics statistics.
Another mistake we often come across is the location of the Google Analytics tracking code. Website owners worry about page load speed, and rightly so given how much weight Google gives it in its SEO ranking algorithm. As a result, many SEO teams place the code just above the </body> tag so the site’s visual elements can load before the code runs. However, placing the tracking code at the end of the <body> means losing visitors who click quickly through the site’s pages before the Google Analytics tracking code runs. This is a mistake to avoid, because the Google Analytics tracking code loads asynchronously and therefore doesn’t slow down page loading.
Finally, never add more than one Google Analytics tracking code to a page, since having two on the same page means messy data in Google Analytics.
JavaScript errors
Lastly, there are a couple of common JavaScript-related errors that prevent statistics from being collected properly.
The first is JavaScript errors on the page. Tracking services only work if the page’s JavaScript code runs correctly. If any of your other JavaScript on the page has errors, the tracker code won’t run. The browser’s scripting engine will stop and no tracking data will be collected.
Finally, some browsers have JavaScript disabled. Tracking services collect information from any visitor who loads the JavaScript tag in the page code, so if the browser has JavaScript disabled, no tracking data will be collected.
Now you know why statistics from your tracking server and your eCommerce platform don’t match, and how to make the server deliver data as accurately as possible. However, the eCommerce platform, LogiCommerce, will give you completely reliable data, since it counts data from the most reliable source and also has a powerful filter to block unwanted traffic.
