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Customers new to Mochahost Managed WordPress sometimes ask: “Why does the Mochahost Dashboard show more visitors than Google Analytics does?” The answer lies in how Google Analytics counts visitors versus how Mochahost tracks visitors. In fact, you might say that Google Analytics and Mochahost don’t track the same things exactly.

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How Google Analytics tracks visitors

Google Analytics tracks visitors that have JavaScript enabled. This generally means that the visitor being tracked is a human who is using a standard web browser, whether on a mobile device, laptop, or desktop PC. Google is focused on helping you understand all of the statistics surrounding the people that visit your website. But these aren’t the only visitors to your website, and that’s where Mochahost is different.

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How Mochahost tracks all visitors

Tracking visitors who have JavaScript enabled in their browser is a great way to track humans visiting your site, but it does not paint a complete picture of all visitors. There are non-human visitors to your website: bots, crawlers, and other automated systems that visit your site regularly. These bots and crawlers do not have JavaScript enabled, so Google Analytics does not count them as human visitors. Google Analytics is a marketing tool that focuses on statistics about humans that can be turned into conversions. Although these automated visitors are not humans, they still consume resources similar to what a human visitor would, most notably bandwidth. For this reason, Mochahost tracks all visitors to your site, regardless of their nature. Any HTTP GET request made to your site is tracked. At times, bots can represent a very large percentage of traffic, which directly correlates to the higher numbers you see on the Mochahost Dashboard.

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Conclusion

To put it simply, Google Analytics tracks humans for marketing purposes, while Mochahost tracks all visitors—including automated bots and crawlers—because they all impact your website and hosting. As a result, the visitor numbers on the Mochahost Dashboard are higher than the pageviews reported in Google Analytics.