SM Stats versus Google Analytics

MomaZunk · January 3, 2013

Every so often, I get a huge difference in my google analytics, and the SM statistics.

The SM stats from the last 2 days for a couple of my galleries has been seen alot of hits, but I am not seeing the same level of activity in google analytics.

Why is this, and what could be going on?

Thanks,

rainforest1155 · January 3, 2013

Hi Dee,

The reason is that you cannot compare Google Analytics and SmugMug stats since they count very different things. SmugMug counts photo views while Google counts page views. Page views can only be counted if a person actually views one of your pages. Photo views on the other hand can also occur outside of your site, like on photos embedded on a blog, forum etc.
Then there are also slideshows where each photo viewed counts as a photo view while Google cannot track slideshows.

So it's quite normal for these two stats to differ.

MomaZunk · January 3, 2013

I am not talking about slight differences. The ratio of the difference is over 1000/1.

mbonocore · January 3, 2013

MomaZunk wrote: »

I am not talking about slight differences. The ratio of the difference is over 1000/1.

Someone could have left your website with a slideshow open all day long. It would then tick up a new view every couple of minutes. How many photos are showing huge differences?

Michael

MomaZunk · January 3, 2013

2 different galleries, with google analytics real time not showing anyone on the site. I am just thinking there is a bot in the background or something.
One of the galleries has roughly the same number of views for all of the images, so the slide show makes since.

The other gallery, has roughly the same number of views per image for 70 of the 194 images in the gallery. Strange!

I better understand the differences between the 2 metrics. Thanks

mbonocore · January 4, 2013

Sure thing Dee! Please let us know if you have any more questions.

Michael

SM Stats versus Google Analytics

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