bit.ly vs. Google Analytics
Okay, something isn’t right here. Either bit.ly is lying or Google Analytics is lying. Or I’m missing something. If you aren’t familiar with bit.ly it’s one of the many URL shorteners out there. It’s very commonly used on Twitter where there is a 140 character posting limit. It also provides stats for who clicked on the link - which is pretty cool. Only problem is just I noticed today that bit.ly says almost 10X as much traffic as Google Analytics reports. What? Anybody have any ideas? My only guess at this point is a lot of people have Javascript disabled in which case Google Analytics would do nothing. I’d love to know if others see the same thing.
I have noticed the same thing. When bit.ly’s folks talk about the issue, they say that they don’t hide the fact that it’s bots, and therefore are not misleading the users.
I say that since the bot traffic is combined with human traffic, the stats are useless. Since that discussion, I mostly use budurl.com (which at least makes it visible which traffic belongs to whom) and sometimes bit.ly (when I need one that’s reallly short) but I never, ever look at the bit.ly stats anymore.
I work on a case study re: clicks number discrepancy and so far I can tell you that it seem that about 5% of people have their JS disabled.
Source:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
So, obviously, the JS disabling alone does not create such huge difference in metrics.
Thanks Sean and Roman. I am going to try out budurl as an alternative. Yeah I thought that much javascript disabled was insanely high. Good to know…