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Bots. Spam ruins it for everyone. Cloudflare, for example, provide an analytics platform based off of logs, but it overreports visits by a huge amount for most

Bots. Spam ruins it for everyone. Cloudflare, for example, provide an analytics platform based off of logs, but it overreports visits by a huge amount for most cases because javascript is a good filter for most bots. Here's Cloudflare's page on why there is a discrepancy between their numbers and GA-type services: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037684111-Why-do-my-Cloudflare-traffic-numbers-look-different-than-other-services-Google-Compete-as-well-as-my-own-log-files- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003768411... And here's a blog post by a self-hosted-analytics provider who shows exact numbers from his personal blog: https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/ https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/ He has a stake in the matter, but it's also such a huge discrepancy that I'm guessing is hard to fake. Anecdotally, friends I have with small blogs mirror this experience.

blacklight 6y ago
Bot activities in web server logs isn't that hard to spot. They often don't use "regular" user agents, they usually only download a page's HTML without getting all the images and media, they often do a GET on /robots.txt before proceeding, they manifest unrealisticly short times between browsing a page and going to the next one, and they often come from known IP subnets. My simple log parsing heuristic can already remove 90% of the bot traffic from the statistics.
account42 6y ago
GA also underreports because people block it. Might not be relevant for most sites but if your audience is tech-related don't expect it to be irrelevant.