A common question our customers ask us is why site traffic statistics in their Google Analytics reports vary from those in Commerce Vision statistics reports.
To answer this question, it is important to understand how both the Customer Self Service eCommerce Platform and the Google Analytics engines work. And more importantly, to know how the Internet works when indexing and searching websites.
Google Analytics works by including a block of JavaScript code in the pages of your website. When a webpage loads, it executes JavaScript.
JavaScript is a scripting language used to create and control dynamic website content. This includes anything that moves, refreshes or otherwise changes on your screen without requiring you to manually reload a web page. When users on your site view a page, the JavaScript code executes/runs the tracking operation for Google Analytics and stores this as a visit. It will also track a user if they have gone to a product view page or checkout. |
Because your website configuration and reporting needs might differ from a standard setup, it's a good idea to understand the general tracking process to ensure that your reports deliver data as you expect. This way, you can decide how to configure Analytics tracking to best suit your website. |
Commerce Vision tracks all user interactions on your website. Human users are defined as Guest Users (users that not logged in or created an account who are browsing your site (usually in the Public Role)), and Authenticated Users. User interactions with the website may include but are not limited to human users browsing the website from an internet browser, crawlers or bots that interact with the website, or any automatic script that calls commands from the website such as get pricing or get product information. Every page rendered, search executed, and all data service calls are logged in the User Session table for the site.
IMPORTANT - The Statistics page of the application is based on the User Session data to formulate Page and User statistics. This page will show all user interactions regardless of user or method used to access the site.
A web crawler/bot is like someone who goes through all the books in a disorganised library and puts together a card catalogue so that anyone who visits the library can quickly and easily find the information they need. To help categorise and sort the library's books by topic, the organiser will read the title, summary, and some of the internal text of each book to figure out what it's about. A web crawler, spider, or search engine bot downloads and indexes content from all over the Internet. Such a bot aims to learn what (almost) every web page on the Web is about so it can retrieve the information when needed. It's called a "web crawler" because crawling is the technical term for automatically accessing a website and obtaining data via a software program.
IMPORTANT- A bot will not always load a web page in the same way a browser will load and execute the page. In most cases, so bots can more quickly scan an entire site, they will not execute the JavaScript on a web page, which in the case of Google Analytics, will not fire off the statistical information to capture this event in the Google Analytics portal. |
A "good" bot is any bot that performs useful or helpful tasks that aren't detrimental to a user's experience on the Internet. Because good bots can share similar characteristics with malicious bots, the challenge when putting together a bot management strategy is to make sure good bots aren’t blocked.
There are many kinds of good bots, each designed for different tasks. Here are some examples:
Some bots are bad for business. Here are some examples:
Website scraper bots: These bots will generally send a series of HTTP GET requests and then copy and save all the information that the web server sends back. They will continue doing this through the hierarchy of a website until it's copied all the content. More sophisticated scraper bots can use JavaScript to, for instance, fill out every form on a website and download any gated content. "Browser automation" programs and APIs allow automated bot interactions with websites and APIs, pretending to be a traditional web browser in an attempt to trick the website’s server into thinking a human user is accessing the content. True, an individual can manually copy and paste an entire website instead, but bots can crawl and download all a website's content in a matter of seconds. Even for large sites like e-commerce sites with hundreds or thousands of individual product pages.
Price scraping bots: These bots downloads all the pricing information from a competitor company's website so that a business can adjust their own pricing accordingly.
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. This is the discipline of readying content for search indexing so that a website shows up higher in search engine results. If search engine bots do not crawl a website, then it cannot be indexed, and it won't show up in search results. For this reason, if a website owner wants to get organic traffic (not from paid ads) from search results, they mustn't block web crawler bots.
The differences between Commerce Vision's statistics and those of Google Analytics typically vary for site traffic, especially on the home page.