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Google Analytics is off by 99%
Posted by on March 6, 2026 at 7:04 amI never fully trusted Google Analytics. I run my own servers, so I can record anything I want on the server side, including things Google cannot track without an elaborate setup. On top of that, I do not like annoying users with GDPR and cookie popups. It is a terrible user experience. So I try to avoid it whenever I can. Usually on my own sites.
I have my own almost perfect way of getting the statistics I need. It is based on very intimate knowledge of how my pages work. I know exactly what a normal user footprint should look like, so I can easily detect deviations that indicate a bot and filter those out using multiple signals.
Over time, however, I started to suspect that sites without Google Analytics rank worse than sites that use it. I have one very niche website that gets single digit real human visits per day, plus tons of bots, which I actually welcome because I am trying to learn how AI optimizations work. The new version of the site has been up for a year, and the old version was up for a decade. It has a stable minimal inflow of visitors that does not change much over time. I am not doing any SEO or marketing for this site at all, so it is a perfect testbed.
Yesterday I decided to test my theory that adding Google Analytics might boost my ranking on Google, so I set it up.
Today I checked the stats and, to my surprise, Google reported 2.2K new users and 2.3K active users for yesterday alone. I know for a fact that there were only single digit real users yesterday.
Even the Google Analytics own numbers do not make sense: it is an English only website providing specialized services for lawyers, yet 25% of visitors are from Vietnam. 95.02% percent of all visitors hit one specific 404 page (SEO experiment page I removed). According to Google Analytics, I allegedly ave around 100 active users at every moment, referrers: 95% direct, the rest is "unassigned", 100% is Windoiws/desktop, 2K users has 1280×1200 and the rest 3840×2160
Meanwhile, all I see in my own server side logs are bots, bots, and only bots, and I am absolutely certain of it.
I am honestly shocked at how unusable this tool has become. One cannot seriously use this tool to make any data-driven conclusions if it is off by 99%.
I just wanted to share my surprise. I tried to test PR boosting theory, and instead I discovered how corrupt the data in Analytics is.
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1 Reply
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Server logs and GA measure completely different things.
Logs capture every request to the server, while GA only fires when the tracking script executes in the browser (or a bot emulating one).
That difference alone can create huge discrepancies, especially on small sites. -
There are new bots every day. And there are agent bots that are grabbing stuff from your site as people are asking about it in your agent sometimes.
Unless they are known bad bots (and even then, I’m not sure Google makes that choice at all – you have to decide if they are good or bad and tell it what to do) or known crawlers it’s going to count them because, for all intents and purposes, it might very well be an agent on a task for a user who might be a customer.
Also – I agree with your GDPR philosophy in principle, maybe – it does make things a pain in the butt. But it’s required. And for the EU GDPR is an opt in thing – as are California, New York, and a growing number of sites. You don’t need permission (in most cases) for first party data so long as you never plan on sharing it. But as soon as you introduce Google or some other party to the system – the game changes. Now people have to opt-in or Analytics isn’t going to count them (unless it’s not a human).
So yeah – if you are using analytics and you’ve got traffic in places where this matters, since you are never asking them to opt in, they aren’t going to be tracked.
Well, that’s a bit overly simplified, but you get the idea. 99% of the traffic is likely to be bots if you’ve not asked for and gotten people to opt in. In fact, it really should be a number that’s exactly 100%, It looks like it might be over tracking a bit.
Anyway – any test I’ve seen over the years as to whether Analytics helps or not has resulted in either a “No” or a “No with a caveat” – and that caveat is that if you use Analytics, you might also be more inclined to be using that tracking data to improve SEO and therefore a site with it is more likely to rank better because the marketing team has data. Now with 1st Party Data being more common – I would suspect that any testing now would result in “No” and forget the caveat. In fact, the best optimized sites might be indicated by the ones that are larger brands (who should have a search budget) but do not use GA4 because first party data isn’t necessarily anonymized unless you’re planning on sharing or selling it.
G.
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I started to change from Google Analytics to self-hosted Matomo … Google Analytics was in the past good but today it is, in my opinion, too confusing and not user friendly.
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Good experiment. I think I will get a second opinion too
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I mean, from reading this and your comments on the thread, all I see is an over confident person who thinks everything they’ve done to identify traffic is perfect and everything Google has done is incorrect.
also, GDPR is a legal requirement if you are operating in the EU – and cookie popups are far from a ‘terrible user experience’. I use them on every site I visit to exclude myself from certain tracking tech. If a site doesn’t have one, I exit immediately.
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Putting aside the analytics issue, it would be good to know the outcome of the PR test – though I’d expect it to take to update. 🤔
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