Thread

GA isn’t targeted at RSS and a lot of RSS readers (and aggregators) might ignore JS code altogether.

I found this thread after being concerned about the same thing—the huge difference between EE stats and Google Analytics.

I spent quite a few years working for Internet divisions at two large media companies. Both divisions had Omniture, which is a probably the most dominant commercial stats package out there and used by many major companies. Omniture also suggested putting the tracking code at the bottom of the page because of page load issues after we quit another stats company and went with them. When we did that, we saw a fairly significant drop in page views.

We had to do it not only to track complete page loads accurately, but also to provide accurate stats to our advertisers. It became clear to us that page load is a factor in total traffic, especially for sites with 600k pages that are visited by people with DSL, dialup (yes, they still exist) and other slow connections.

That said, I don’t like seeing lower page views, but too conservative is better than too liberal (except maybe in politics, where moderate is fine with me).