WordPress Jetpack Stats or Google Analytics – what’s the difference?

WordPress is one of the most popular website content management system (CMS), ranking 2^nd in the 2016 Top Ten Reviews.com website. 

This CMS program offers hundreds of add-ons with user friendly functionality and strong community support. One of those add-ons is JetPack Stats, an analytical tool that helps you measure your website data, like how many visits your site has or which post and pages are the most viewed.

Wordpress.com describes JetPack Stats (WP Stats) as being somewhat limited, in that it only analyzes the most popular metrics; but you can also get information about referrers, search engine terms, subscriptions, and clicks, all in a very easy to understand format. WP Stats also allows you to use other analytic plugins, like Google Analytics (GA), so you can use both and get a more in-depth look into your data.

I like the way blog writer Andrew Urevig explains it, he says website analytics are like eyes that allow you to see the path (into the soul of the data) so you can effectively manage your website. Urevig does agree that using GA requires more setup time, but it is a worthwhile tradeoff to have access to more in-depth data; like being able to set up and track goals and conversions, which you cannot do with WP Stats. Urevig wraps up by explaining that WP Stats is great for a basic look at web data but suggests adding GA to obtain the additional features. I agree that using both is the best of both worlds.

For another perspective, I found an article by Chernboy on Tree Top Media’s website that believes it may be time to replace GA with WPStats. Whoa, now that is news to me. This statement definitely caught my attention.

Chernboy starts off by stating how the internet is now being bombarded with referral spam: Semalt, Seo-Best-Offer, ILoveVitaly, and so many more. He says these spam referrals makes the website traffic worthless, “especially low traffic sites”. I can attest to this being an accurate statement. This blog, for example, received a significant increase in views over the weekend from the referral site, ILoveVitaly, an obvious spam bot. IgniteVisibility.com describes this ghost referral as “creating fake page views that are posted to Google’s tracking services via random tracking IDs to wreak havoc on unsuspecting websites. The article’s author, John Lincoln, says, “I’ll admit, curiosity is powerful. We all want to see where that new link is coming from, but you’re better off not clicking on it.” Instead he suggests adding filters in your GA to try and eliminate the spam bot from being tracked, but this is quite an involved procedure and it doesn’t always work, click here to read more.

Now back to Chernboy, who says that WP Stats makes it easier to block referral spams. He explains that all you have to do is, “log into your WP Stats dashboard. Go to your site stats and the referrers section. Click the three dots next to any referrer that is an expected spammer and a little box will pop with word SPAM in it. Then just click the word SPAM.” That’s it - goodbye spammer.  Here’s another one - “floating-share-buttons.com” click here to learn how to get rid of that spam invader.

Basically, Chernboy feels GA is a good tool, but he is so annoyed with the difficulty of eliminating spam referral in GA that he recommends sticking to WP Stats until GA resolves this problem. I too am very upset. I tied my Gmail account to this blog, the same email I use to manage all my other client’s websites. You know where I’m going with this. Now those sites are being inundated with referral spam and that wasn’t the case before. Is that coincidence or did I open a door and jeopardize the integrity of the other sites? I must admit, I did click on a couple of those spam referrals off of this blog’s GA report – big mistake. Please feel free to comment and offer your suggestions/thoughts about this.

Now getting back to WP stats. I do like it more than GA, because it is easier to use and navigate. I manage nonprofit websites, so our need to track goals and conversions are limited, therefore, more in-depth reporting is not as critical. Another element I noticed, was that my views on WP Stats are higher than on GA. According to Justin Taylor, Internet Marketing Consultant, GA uses Java Script, so if a user has Java turned off, then GA cannot track that visitor. Do you know of other reasons why there would be a difference in views?

Another blogger, Patrick Rauland, writes on his blog that WP Stats is just for fun. He says he likes the “pretty graph on his dashboard” and that he can “drill pretty deep from within WordPress admin”. Rauland does say that using both is a good idea to compare analytics, to see how some aspects may work better for measuring your website’s data, but for him, WP Stats is fun, cool, and easy to use, just not his primary go to source. He cautions that if WP goes away, out of business - then you’ll lose all your data, but with Google you’ll never have to worry, you can back up your data.

For me, WordPress Stats are my go to source for a quick overview of what going on with the website. I’ll then go to GA to check how things compare and if there are any discrepancies, which may alert me that something is wrong, then I know to delve deeper to resolve any issues. 

Because Google’s tracking and options are more robust, and because it comes highly recommended by most experts in the field, I tend to hold GA in high esteem. I do worry that the spam referral bots are the tip of the iceberg for GA, due to its popularity, it is very vulnerable to more malicious exploits. It reminds me of the operating systems running on PC vs Mac. Since there were more businesses, especially government using PC’s Windows platform, there were more viruses created to attack the PC’s Operating System. I say the same is true with GA. I give a word of caution, user beware would be my motto for GA – if it ever gets really bad, well I always have my WP Stats.