: Difference in traffic stats - WP Statistics Plugin & Google Analytics I am monitoring traffic on a website using both Google Analytics and WP-Statistics plugin. Google Analytics reports about

@LarsenBagley505

A few things that could be contributing that you could look at...

Exclusion List
If you have enabled IP subnet exclusions you could be excluding more visitors than you intend from the statistics in WP. If you are trying to exclude a single IP address then you need to make sure to include a subnet mask of 32 otherwise the default subnet mask of 0 will be used.

Verify Google Analytics Only Appears Once
This may sound simple but it happens frequently, especially when using CMS's like WordPress, that the Google Analytics code winds up appearing multiple times on the same page which causes multiple hits on GA servers for each page view. Check this using your browsers view source tool and check over to verify that the analytics code is only called once and is only pushing the pageview event once.

Check Server Error Logs
Check your server error logs for one of the sample days and see if there are any errors with messages coming from your WordPress installation. Due to the way exceptions are handled within WordPress at times a plugin can fail in a certain task but still output the page to the browser as if nothing is wrong. If this is happening then it is very possible that WP Stats is not loading the data into your database for the visit but is not preventing WP from generating the page and sending it to the end user.

Dig Into the GA Records
Take a very close look at your Google Analytics records and check information such as browsers, geolocation, and if a visit has been flagged as a search engine or not. Even if you are comparing what has been considered organic unique visitors daily it may be flagging differently between the two systems.

Finally Accept the Difference
I realise this may not be the answer you are searching for but if you have exhausted all the other options then there is not much you can do to change it. Unfortunately you will always get differences between WP Stats and GA, sometimes small differences, other times larger differences. The reason for this is the way the technology works. WP Stats is a server side plugin and so works off the data it sees on the server side and executes there. Google Analytics on the other hand, while a more powerful system, is javascript based and so is run on the end users browser. At times you will find that the organic unique visitors in WP will show up as higher than GA, at other times you will see that it is lower. As long as both Google Analytics and WP Statistics have been installed correctly and are running and you don't have an exclusion rule on one that doesn't appear on the other then you have done all you can do and there is not much more than can be looked at to find out why the difference as it will come down to elements outside your control like client side browser configurations.

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