Does Google LIE?

[Imagine]

Tools like MouseFlow and Hotjar can be quite useful to properly measure how people are interacting with your website.

They're brilliant (and scary) tools for the armoury. They don't half affect your Page Speed results though

[DeckstarDeluxe]

Web server stats for hits / requests don't filter out "visits" by known, or any, bots. Google does.

I use to filter out visits less than a second to make sure I don't include bots in my stats.

I've not moved over to the new tracking system yet, job for the quieter months but I'd imagine with the increase in VPNs and things like that it's going to be harder to have accurary stats?

[Marc J]

I've not moved over to the new tracking system yet, job for the quieter months but I'd imagine with the increase in VPNs and things like that it's going to be harder to have accurary stats?

VPNs not so much, although they will give an incorrect location via the IP address. The main thing is cookies - if they're not allowed, then tracking a user's flow through your site, or determining if they are a returning visitor, becomes harder. GA4 claims to use "machine learning" to plug the gaps, but I'm not sure how reliable that is!

[ppentertainments]

I stopped monitoring rankings, visitors etc around 5 years ago. People tend not to book from one single source point I find, and a lot of time was being spent monitoring activity etc.

I am probably in the wrong, but so long as the bookings are coming in can see no need at all to monitor ranking or visits – let’s face it rankings don’t really matter, and as far as visits go, if you do 100 bookings a year, you only need 10 visits a month to your site.

[Nakatomi]

I stopped monitoring rankings, visitors etc around 5 years ago. People tend not to book from one single source point I find, and a lot of time was being spent monitoring activity etc.

I am probably in the wrong, but so long as the bookings are coming in can see no need at all to monitor ranking or visits – let’s face it rankings don’t really matter, and as far as visits go, if you do 100 bookings a year, you only need 10 visits a month to your site.

Yeah I'm not overly concerned as long as the leads keep coming in. I just struggled to understand why there's an apparent disconnect between reality & what google tells me