Possible bug in stats of smf?

[rv77]

I have several thousand fewer hits in my google analytics and adsense accounts for my forum (http://talk-plainly.net [nofollow]).

I have asked google about it, but after a few days of research by them they can't find the discrepancy. They claim their tracking code is working correctly. At thousands of hits, the only thing that stands out is the low count for Internet Explorer user agents, but I've checked the javascripts with win32/win7/IE9 debugger, and it reports no errors for my forum.

I have also checked that the tracking code is on every page in the forum, index, board index, posts view.. It's there.

If you need any more information to help me, I'm able and very willing to provide that here.

And thanks for your time.

[青山 素子]

Google Analytics uses Javascript to track users. Likewise for adsense. Many people use advertisement blockers, so AdSense will not detect those people. Other people value their privacy and explicitly block Google from tracking them. Those people won't be tracked by Google Analytics. In addition, sometimes a browser will have an issue where those Javascript pieces just won't run.

The internal forum statistics will be more accurate as they use actual page loads for counting and do not depend on any behavior that can be blocked. Also note that depending on where you are viewing the server-side statistics, that may include robot visits which will also not be counted by Google.