First Glance Comparing New vs Old Google Analytics Tracking Codes
I installed the new ga.js tracking script on this blog a few weeks ago and decided to take a look today to see if there are any reporting differences. Here’s what I found for the same time period:
| Google Traffic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Old | New | |
| Total Visits: | 1293 | 1047 |
| Pages Per Visit: | 1.28 | 1.57 |
| Avg Time on Site: | 00:00:23 | 00:01.01 |
| Unique Referring Phrases: | 783 | 765 |
Here’s a couple of screenshots of the top referring phrases. You can clearly see the differences.
Old:
New:
So as you can see, there’s quite a discrepancy, even for my site which doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all. I think I’m going to have to dig into this further and compare these stats with log files to see which is more accurate. I also want to make sure that the tracking codes really do appear on every page, to make sure that isn’t skewing the stats somewhat.
I’ll post back again when I find more info. If anyone else is doing a similar test, what are you finding?
