I recently purchased Netlify Analytics for my main website, netlify site name maxlaumeister, hosted at maxlaumeister.com.
In the last 7 days, Netlify Analytics says that I’ve received 1,205 visitors to my /search/ page. Google Analytics says I’ve received 4. Not 4 thousand, just 4.
I expected to see a discrepancy since some users block Google Analytics, but this is a way, way larger gap than I expected. What could explain this?
Screenshots:
We include bot traffic; google doesn’t.
Over the past 7 days, I see all of the top 4 user agents as being things that GA might miss. This is “number of resources served per user agent”:
Fascinating. Thanks Chris.
Looks like the bulk of it is Mastodon bots still trying to find the node I set up for a couple months for fun in 2018. Hopefully a robots.txt line will discourage them from coming back. And some 410s, for good measure. Thank you for that data.
Aside from that, it looks like there are a lot of other bots, which is fine and good except that it makes Netlify Analytics not useful for me unless there’s some way to filter them out of the data. I couldn’t find a feature on the dashboard for that.
Noted, @maxlaumeister - we definitely hope to refine this in the future.
Hello,
Is this information available on the dashboard or whatever ? Or only for Netlify tech guys ?
Because I do not see this.
Thanks.
Hi, @divinerites, this is not information shown in the dashboard currently. I did add you the feature request to clearly segment all spider/crawler/bot traffic.
FWIW I saw a lot of discrepancies between Google’s and Netlify’s analytics (given the same time frame). I wrote them up in a post for anyone who feels so inclined.
Is there a way to differentiate bots from real users with Netlify analytics in 2021?
Hi @Alphability,
Unfortunately, no update at the moment.
Any update about Netlify Analytics?
What’s the roadmap for this?
Hey there, @Alphability 
Unfortunately, I do not have an update to share publicly at this time. I know this isn’t the answer you were looking for. That being said, the team is aware that folks are interested in more information.
Thanks for the answer on this. Seems like Netlify’s Analytics can’t be used at the moment due to this, or am I missing something? With the majority of network traffic being bots, this will skew all graphs and stats of the analytics page. For now, I enabled notifications for this issue, so I can re-subscripe to the paid Netlify Analytics for my websites 
Thank you
hey there felix, thank you.
I’ve passed this info back to our teams and we do hope there will be some changes here at some point.
please keep asking for this!
I just received an email reminder:
Question not solved? Let’s get you some more help. Please post again in the thread so we can keep assisting!
So I’ll take this opportunity to confirm that I’m still interested in seeing a fix. Thanks!
I’ve gotten four of these email reminders so far - one every week - so I take it that it’s important for me to keep posting if I want to keep this thread alive. I’m indeed still interested in a resolution to this thread. Thanks!
I’ll second this, would love to see bot filters in Netlify analytics.
Hey there, @kim 
Thanks for chiming in. I have shared your feedback with our product team!
Is this issue resolved? I’d also like to use Netlify Analytics with bot filters. Unfortunately I can’t sign up for Analytics without a fix.
No, since it’s not an “issue” we are intending to resolve. There is a feature request to change the behavior, which we are not working at the moment.
If you’d like to see less accurate analytics, google analytics will be able to provide them for you for free 
No, since it’s not an “issue” we are intending to resolve. There is a feature request to change the behavior, which we are not working at the moment.
If you’d like to see less accurate analytics, google analytics will be able to provide them for you for free
I apologize in advance if this comes off as a bit blunt.
Netlify Analytics is advertised to provide data about a website’s users. In practice, it provides no useful data about users. The product doesn’t work as advertised. That’s an issue, not a feature request.
In tracking users, Netlify Analytics is off by over two orders of magnitude. Google Analytics is generally considered to be off by less than one order of magnitude, and gives you the granularity to filter bots. So Google Analytics is more accurate at measuring users than Netlify Analytics. This is one reason I and other users in this thread continue to use it instead of your product. Nobody is trying to use Netlify Analytics to track bot behavior.
Several customers have chimed in here, with multiple stating that they have stopped paying for the product until this issue is resolved. I respectfully think it may be time for a vibe check.
