Comparing google analytics with weblog expert

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m wild
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The weblog files and the google analytics files differ enormously.

For example in July alone my weblog files said I have 798,000 visitors to the site yet my google analytics say 172,000. What can be causing the anomaly.

I feel the google analytics is too low. But the weblog is too high. The only explanation I can think of with the google analytics is that the code is not inserted into every page. Yet I inserted into the header which is on every page.

With the weblog expert it is recording my page views in the millions. Making the page views per user look ridiculous. So I know the weblogs are wrong but don't know why?

Could the server be giving wrong data? If so how?
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Thomas Keukens
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled How is it possible that WeblogExpert gives far more visitors (I do not mean hits)....
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Thomas Keukens
Many thanks for the help!
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Michael
Quote from TeKola
I setup %PageFiles% filter and Weblog Expert shows 152,265 Pageviews, GA shows 27,493 Pageviews. WE shows 15,306 Visitors while GA shows 4,100 Users. What's the difference? Bots excluded in WE. There is something wrong.
Probably there are some pages or scripts called using AJAX (and detected as pages based on file extension) that don't contain GA code and so aren't counted in it.

I recommend you to compare the page reports of GA and WLE to check whether the difference occur because of extra pages included in WLE, or whether the same pages have more visitors counted in WLE.
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TeKola
I setup %PageFiles% filter and Weblog Expert shows 152,265 Pageviews, GA shows 27,493 Pageviews. WE shows 15,306 Visitors while GA shows 4,100 Users. What's the difference? Bots excluded in WE. There is something wrong.
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Celand
Cool Michael, thanks for your help.
C.
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Michael
Yes, it sounds good, you should try these settings.
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Celand
OK Michael, thanks for your answer... it is clearer now, thus:

1) I will ask my geeks to set up Weblog filter to "reject" AJAX requests

2) If I ONLY want those who clicked on my page then I need to set up a "File" filter with value %PageFiles% ( I hope the geeks figure this out )

3) If I do both ( 1and 2, not only ONE of these two) the other the spiders the numbers between Weblogs and GA will be a lot closer.

Please confirm
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Michael
Actually the situation is different. If you post some JPEGs on a forum, all visitors of the page with the images (not important how JPEGs they viewed) are counted as visitors of your site in WebLog Expert unless you use filters like I suggested. If visitors click on the images and go directly to images (not to a page on your site), the situation doesn't change. And such visitors aren't counted by GA as they don't visit pages on your site.

If a visitor clicks on a link and visits your site, he/she will be counted as one visitor by both GA and WebLog Expert. The numbers may still differ (e.g. because of unidentified spiders), but there shouldn't be such drastic difference like you mentioned.
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Celand
Being a business person only, without any knowledge of programming... I have concluded from the above as follows....( please forgive me the layman's logic)

1) When I post, lets say 10 jpgs on a page of some unrelated forum and some visitor clicks on that page ( maybe to see something else) and even that this specific visitor has never clicked on any of my 10 jpgs, by this, the visitor opening this unrelated forum page Weblogs "sees" this and reports it as 10 visitors.

2) Using the same example as above, GA would ignore them completely unless the visitor clicked on one of those jpgs. Then, GA would report this single click as a single visitor.

If this is at least "generally" correct assumption ( no need to be "geeky" about it ;) ) then that is all what I need to know. I would not know Java from AJAX anyway.

thanks in advance for the confirmation
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Michael
If you wish to exclude AJAX requests for specific profile, you can do it by creating exclude "File" filters in Profile Properties > Filters. You need to enter full file path without domain, e.g. /controller/action/ - you can view the URL in the Access Statistics > Pages report, you just need to remove the domain here.

You can also use wildcards in the filters, e.g. /controller/*