Since v4.0 October has some nice looking traffic statistics dashboard in the admin area’s front page. But the information my dashboard shows is not easy for me to understand, because it is significantly different from Googla Analytics dashboard also attached to the same website. A few examples:
For a certain date, OCMS Dashboard shows over over 300 visits and over 200 unique visitors, wile for the same date GA shows 0 visits. This is even more surprising knowing that (at least according to GA) my website rarely receives more than 10 visits per week.
For a different date, OCMS Dashboard shows 0 visits, while GA shows 2 visits. The same difference then repeats for 3 different dates.
Slightly related: I empty bad requests log (reset to 0), and wait for 1 day. After a day, OCMS traffic dashboard shows 0 visits, but the bad requests log shows over 13.000 bad requests.
How are any of the above situations possible? Looking at them is making me doubt OCMS traffic dashboard’s accuracy and reliability.
Google Analytics and the internal traffic statistics work differently. One uses the browser (JS) and the other uses the server (PHP).
If GA (JS) is showing 0 visits while OCMS (PHP) shows 200 then it sounds like a page is being viewed without the GA scripts loading fully (such as a crawler, or browser without JS enabled).
Thank you daft. I’m not sure if I fully understand your reply. I mean, I do understand how I’m not expected to see crawlers, robots etc within GA, but what I don’t understand is, how can it happen that GA records visits and visitors for a certain date, and OCMS dashboard doesn’t? How can that be possible?
Sounds like OCMS dashboard is pretty unreliable, honestly.
They both use different mechanisms to track data. Technically a server side implementation is more reliable (not less) but Google does not have this ability, whereas October does.
I mean, that kind of confirms what I’m saying, doesn’t it? I understand how it can happen that OCMS sees visits which GA doesn’t. What I can’t understand is, how can it happen that OCMS does not see visits which GA does? Wouldn’t that suppose to not happen?