I have a few websites, and I have all of them (except this one) in my Google Analytics account. I don’t obsessively watch it, but I keep track of trends.
My main site, Tralfaz, I run on Joomla! which does a pretty good job of internally monitoring the page visits. I find that on days where I make a new post, I typically get 100 – 130 page views of that (mostly from the Product Management community). But Google analytics usually only tell me that 15 – 20 page views happened. I don’t do aggressive SEO, but I do set the meta data and the tags to help the search engines find my content (and they do, most of my visits are not return visitors).
Then yesterday, I put up a new post. It quickly had 100 page views, and today I went to check on my analytics graphs, and wow, it spiked. It is almost identical to what Joomla! tells me that page views was. I wonder if this will continue? (I am not hopeful)
I suspect that google fiddles with the metrics to try to convince me to buy adwords, and to promote my site. But since I run this for fun, and am not looking to commercialize it, the entreaties to use their tools to increase traffic fall on deaf ears.
