Don't despair, you are probably getting more traffic than you think!

We like to measure our traffic, especially if we are spending money on SEO or ad's to see if they are paying off. But it's a bit more complex than simply looking in Google Analytics, because it seems that a lot of our traffic may not even show up there!

Why would visitors not show in Google Analytics?

According to an interesting study, depending on your industry, up to 41.85% of your traffic can be blocked from Google Analytics in some way or another!

Also, there are things that can greatly inflate your traffic such as bots and processes that visit your site, but don't represent actual humans.

Check out this jump in traffic that we had:

I would love to say it was due to some amazing piece of content we pushed out that went semi-viral or a super-successful ad campaign, but it was actually a process from our server that hit our website every few minutes, which has now stopped.

How is Analytics blocked and what can I do about it?

If you can identify bots you can filter them out in Google Analytics. 

As for people blocking analytics on your site there is not much you can do.  Google Analytics tend's to get blocked in the following ways:

• Cookie bars where the user has chosen to not allow Google Analytics to track them
• Anti-virus software that blocks Google Analytics
• Ad blocking software can also block Google Analytics too.

I discovered my Bitdefender plugin for Chrome was blocking analytics when I saw these errors in the console:

There are some workarounds which you can try to solve the issue.

Of you can just bear in mind that you are probably getting more traffic than is showing in Google Analytics and account for that with everything you do.  It depends how big an issue it is for your business really.

Google Analytics is a great tool with many useful insights, but it should just be one thing you use as you strive to learn more about your website and it's visitors.