Hi there. We recently switched to Kinsta for web hosting less than a week ago. We needed something faster. We were on a shared server up until recently.
We chose our Kinsta plan based on our pageviews from Google Analytics. I have to tell you, I’m a little concerned with the pageview discrepancy between Google Analytics and Kinsta.
According to Google, we average around 1.5K pageviews daily. (Sometimes less, sometimes more).
For example, according to Google Analytics as of today for the month of April, we’ve had 4,518. However, according to Kinsta analytics, we’ve had 24,973.
We’ve already had to increase our Kinsta plan in the short time that we’ve been here, exceeding our budget. But at our rate, according to Kinsta, we are going to need an even higher plan likely.
My question is: how is there such a huge difference between Google Analytics and Kinsta Analytics?
I’ve liked Kinsta so far, and fear we may have to abandon it as soon as we came here. I’ve been a bit blindsided by the alleged pageviews Kinsta claims we have.
BTW, we have “bot fight mode” enabled through Cloudflare, and we’re also blocking AI bots on all pages.
Welcome to the Kinsta community forums. Thank you for reaching out to us regarding this concern.
Every analytics program uses a different data set and calculation methodology to generate analytics. At Kinsta, our analytics are based on the raw access logs. We count up the IP addresses that request resources from your website and exclude known bots.
Google Analytics works by adding JavaScript to your site which runs in each site visitor’s browser to gather data. It calculates the number of users and sessions using that data gathered from visitor browsers. This means that Google Analytics won’t count:
- Anyone blocking JavaScript in their browser,
- Users who use ad blockers (about 30% of internet users),
- Bots or web crawlers.
We do not count visits from well-known bot user-agents and do our best to filter bots out of our analytics data. However, bots do quite often spoof their user agent and bot traffic requires server resources (RAM/CPU/bandwidth), as such, some bots might be included in your total visits count since our servers still have to serve those very real digital visitors. We exclude properly identified bot traffic as a courtesy, but ultimately bot traffic takes just as much work for our servers as human traffic.
Because Google Analytics and other tools rely on JavaScript run in the visitor’s browser rather than server access logs, and because they will not detect bot traffic (or even all human traffic), it is normal for there to be a discrepancy between the total visits we show and a browser-based analytics tool. There is no value generated by Google Analytics (or any other browser-based analytics program) that is directly comparable to our visits count.