Can anyone explain why there is a difference between BC dashboard statistics vs Google Analytics?

[Running57]

I monitor Google Analytics for a client and have noticed that there is a factor of 3+ difference between the visitor rates provided by Google Analytics (say 4,000/mth) and BC (say 13,000/mth). Can anyone advise how BC measures a visitor?

[Liam Dilley]

Gogole is the king at this stuff.

BC has a decent stats stystem but it does not handle spam traffic and filter those out as well as Google does.

[Running57]

Thanks Liam,

Are you inferring that 9,000 visitors can be attributed to Spam traffic?

What I do know is that the organic traffic numbers are basically the same on Analytics & BC. The direct traffic is way different - up to 12 times more in BC and referral traffic is recorded as 4-5 times. Would you consider that many spammers bookmark web pages? We do get some spammy comments (maybe 10-20/mth) coming into articles, none to enquiry forms.

I can understand that there could be a difference, but the size of it is hard to understand (at least to me)

[Lynda-S]

I believe it is spam. I have seen hits from places that site should rarely get a visit from but according to BC there are 100s of direct hits from one location.

For instance I built a website for a lawyer in the United States. Realistically my client's site is not going to get hundreds of hits from cities way outside his target market yet he has hundreds of direct traffic hits from China. Google Analytics may count a few hits but no where near the level BC says he has from China. This leads me to believe it is spam visits.

I believe BC was trying to address some of this in the latest release (R195) as they said: "We are no longer recording visits from IPs that have been blacklisted"

Hopefully this means we will see some closing of that gap in visits between the two analytic systems.

Also about spam being direct, I would assume that the links to your sites are pulled from various places on the net and inserted into the spam bots database. When the bot visits your site it is accessing it from its database, not a direct link click from the linked site. I could be wrong but I would assume that it works something like that.

Lynda

[mario_gudelj]

It's the bot traffic you are seeing I believe

[Running57]

Thanks Mario,

I would expect some of it to be "bot" traffic. Googlebot crawls on average 60 pages/day (according to webmaster tools), but I would expect that to be a single visit. I would hope that the many other bots would not be generating 3 times normnal visitor traffic though.

Regards

Geoff

[mario_gudelj]

You'd be surprised how many dodgy people target servers all the time.

Here's the log from a server I deployed 7 days ago which still doesn't have

a domain pointed to it and it's private server on EC2. I can just imagine

how much BC servers are getting slammed.

2014-04-03 03:49:13 HEAD /manager/status

2014-04-03 10:42:34 HEAD /

2014-04-03 12:51:25 HEAD /

2014-04-03 17:34:33 HEAD /manager/status

2014-04-03 17:36:03 GET /

2014-04-03 19:00:48 HEAD /

2014-04-03 20:09:45 GET /manager/html

2014-04-03 20:09:45 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-03 20:51:42 GET /

2014-04-04 02:29:38 GET /

2014-04-04 03:58:14 GET /manager/html

2014-04-04 03:58:14 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-04 04:21:56 HEAD /

2014-04-04 19:25:26 GET /

2014-04-04 19:59:46 GET /manager/html

2014-04-04 19:59:46 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-05 06:44:57 GET /intl/zh-CN/

2014-04-05 07:22:23 GET /manager/html

2014-04-05 07:22:23 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-05 20:33:02 GET /user/soapCaller.bs

2014-04-05 23:05:43 GET /

2014-04-06 01:30:08 GET /manager/html

2014-04-06 01:30:09 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-07 02:11:52 GET /cgi-bin/rtpd.cgi

2014-04-07 06:24:12 GET /

2014-04-07 06:24:36 GET /

2014-04-07 08:32:58 HEAD /

2014-04-07 08:32:59 GET /

2014-04-07 21:25:13 GET /

2014-04-07 21:25:14 GET /robots.txt

2014-04-08 01:35:40 GET /CFIDE/administrator/enter.cfm

2014-04-08 04:55:22 GET /manager/html

2014-04-08 04:55:22 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-08 08:20:50 GET /proxy.txt

2014-04-08 10:03:07 HEAD /

2014-04-08 22:23:16 GET /manager/html

2014-04-08 22:23:16 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-09 08:40:03 GET /

2014-04-09 12:18:51 GET /

2014-04-09 12:18:52 GET /robots.txt

2014-04-09 12:24:47 GET /

2014-04-09 14:55:59 GET /

2014-04-09 15:06:26 GET

/w00tw00t.at.blackhats.romanian.anti-sec:)

2014-04-09 15:06:26 GET /phpMyAdmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 15:06:27 GET /phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 15:06:28 GET /pma/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 15:06:28 GET /myadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 15:06:29 GET /MyAdmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 16:16:42 HEAD /

2014-04-09 18:31:33 HEAD /

2014-04-09 20:12:55 GET /muieblackcat

2014-04-09 20:13:08 GET /db/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:09 GET /dbadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:12 GET /mysql/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:13 GET /mysqladmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:17 GET /phpadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:18 GET /pma/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:18 GET /web/phpMyAdmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:19 GET /xampp/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:20 GET /web/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:21 GET /php-my-admin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:21 GET /websql/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:34 GET /blog/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:35 GET /cpanelphpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:44 GET /phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:45 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.10.0.0/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:46 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.10.0.1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:47 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.10.0.2/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:47 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.10.0/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:48 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.10.1.0/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:48 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.10.2.0/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:48 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.11.0.0/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:49 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.11.1-all-languages/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:49 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.11.1.0/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:51 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.11.1.1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:51 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.11.1.2/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:52 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.6.1-pl2/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:53 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.6.1-pl3/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:54 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.6.4-pl3/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:54 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.6.4-pl4/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:55 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.6.4-rc1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:55 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.6.5/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:55 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.6.6/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:56 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.6.9/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:56 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.7.0-beta1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:57 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.7.0-pl1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:58 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.7.0-pl2/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:59 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.7.0-rc1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:13:59 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.7.5/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:00 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.7.6/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:01 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.7.7/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:05 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.8.2/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:05 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.8.3/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:08 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.8.5/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:10 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.8.6/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:12 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.8.7/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:15 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.8.9/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:17 GET

/phpMyAdmin-2.9.0-rc1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:17 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.9.0.1/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:17 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.9.0.2/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:18 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.9.0/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:22 GET /phpMyAdmin-2.9.2/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:29 GET

/phpMyAdmin-3.0.0.0-all-languages/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:48 GET

/phpMyAdmin-3.1.2.0-all-languages/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:49 GET

/phpMyAdmin-3.1.2.0-english/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 20:14:58 GET /phpMyAdmin3/scripts/setup.php

2014-04-09 22:10:17 GET /admin/assets.txt

2014-04-10 00:00:17 GET /

2014-04-10 00:16:24 GET /manager/html

2014-04-10 00:16:24 GET /manager/html/

2014-04-10 08:42:45 GET /fastenv

2014-04-10 10:05:13 HEAD /

2014-04-10 10:41:58 HEAD /

2014-04-10 10:41:58 GET /clientaccesspolicy.xml

[Liam Dilley]

Being on the Amazon servers these things can just cycle through the IP address and just spam all day long. It was one of the thing BC was hit hard on early on with the migration and they had to deploy a lot of stuff.

[Running57]

Hi Lynda,

Many thanks, I think that you & Liam have hit the spot. I cross checked Analytics with BC and the geographies visitors come from.

The Australian visitors match closely, but there is a huge visitor rate from US(4,000), France (1,500), China (750) etc etc.. I noted also the page views from these visitors and compared this to the site average on Analytics - way down. On average these show just over 1 page view/visit compared to 2.6 from Analytics - probably a good indicator of spam.

Given this, I have a number of clients that review the dashboard each week when the notification is sent from BC. For some I'm sure that the numbers are over inflated.

Regards

Geoff