Big difference between Wordpress stats and server logs

November 20, 2017 8:38 PM

Hi, I volunteer as co-editor and main tech person for an academic collaborative blog. In our most recent full calendar month (October 2017), there was a 4-fold difference between the unique visitors reported by our server logs (Awstats) and what was reported by Wordpress.com. Why?

We host our blog on our own domain and those are the only two stats programs I have access to. The big difference last month is not unique - in most months, Awstats/server logs are showing 4 times more unique visitors to our blog. Whom do we trust - the webhost or Wordpress? And why the big discrepancy? I have searched the web and the AskMe archives as well as both Wordpress and server help files, with no success.

Feel free to also recommend any good resources for non-profit web management and analytics. Thanks in advance for your help!

posted by acridrabbit to Technology (5 answers total)

It's been so long since I've touched Wordpress that I won't speculate on what's going on there, but Google Analytics is pretty much the standard in this stuff and it generally does a fairly good job of filtering out the garbage. But hades is correct that none of these are perfect, and you should think about things in relative terms.
posted by primethyme at 8:54 PM on November 20, 2017

Response by poster: I should have specified that the Awstats report I am looking at is specifically the "viewed traffic," which excludes spiders, bots, etc.

Also, there's nothing else on this domain except the blog, so there aren't any non-Wordpress areas or pages.
posted by acridrabbit at 9:26 AM on November 21, 2017

Best answer: Is it possible someone is hotlinking your content? That would show up in AWS but not Wordpress.
posted by justkevin at 10:01 AM on November 21, 2017

I browse with NoScript and RequestPolicy plugins, so if counting is done by something that those block only the logs will notice me. If your site doesn't display/work right and I actually try to enable some scripts and requests to make it work ... that forces the browser to reload the page. Depending on your site, it might take me 3-4 rounds of enabling various suspect looking scripts and such to make it work at all. More than 3-4 tries and I just give up on your site entirely.

Just from that, I can see myself showing up 3-4x in logs vs some smarter sort of tracking.
posted by zengargoyle at 3:50 PM on November 21, 2017

Two things to check out:

Have a look at the actual files that awstats is counting as pages via the full list. Are all those what you would consider pages, or can see you other types of files in there?

Have a look at pageviews for a few particular pages in the two systems. Do they all follow the same ratio or do some match more closely than others? Is there a common factor for outliers?
posted by Sparx at 7:16 PM on November 23, 2017