Why your figures differ from Google Analytics
Two tools never count the same thing, and the gap can be explained. Here are the causes, from the most frequent to the rarest.
In short
Pulsar almost always shows more visits than Google Analytics, often ten to forty per cent more. The main cause is blocking: extensions and recent browsers block Google Analytics far more often than Pulsar.
Blocking, by far the first cause
Ad blockers, browsers with enhanced protection and some corporate networks filter Google's domains. Pulsar, less well known and served from another domain, gets through more often.
The gap is small on a general, older audience, and large on a technical or young one. On a site aimed at developers, it commonly exceeds forty per cent.
Consent
If your site shows a banner, Google Analytics only measures after acceptance. Every visitor who refuses, or leaves before answering, is invisible to it.
Pulsar measures without consent, so from the very first page. On a site where half the visitors refuse, the gap is mechanically twofold.
The definitions
- The session. Google Analytics closes a session at midnight and opens a new one; it also opens one on every campaign change.
- The visitor. Pulsar does not recognise a visitor from one day to the next, by design. Over a long period it will therefore count more unique visitors.
- The time zone. Check that both tools use the same one, otherwise the days are not cut at the same moment.
Do not try to make the two figures match, you will not succeed. What matters is that the trends agree: if one rises by twenty per cent, the other should rise too.
Read next
- Reading your dashboard The dashboard reads from top to bottom: volume first, then where visitors come from, what they read, and what they do. Every row in a list is clickable and filters the whole page.
- Setting goals A goal turns a measured event into a tracked conversion. Click the star next to an event in the dashboard, and it appears among your goals from then on, with its conversion rate.
- Following a journey with a funnel A funnel counts how many visitors clear each step of a journey, and where they drop out. You define the steps by page or by event, in the order in which they must happen.
- Seeing where your visitors click A heatmap overlays your visitors' clicks and scrolling on a screenshot of the page. It is enabled page by page, on the addresses you choose.
- Excluding your own visits Add your IP addresses to the account exclusions, and your visits stop being counted on all your sites. The exclusion applies at collection, so immediately and with no effect on history.
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