Hi all. I'm new to Webtrends and have recently completeed my first installation. I'm a bit confused by the data I'm getting back. Page views are slightly higher than those for Google Analytics as would be expected. Visits and Unique Visitor numbers are coming back 20 - 30% lower than Google Analytics figures for the same period which makes no sense whatsoever. I've run the test over several days and diferent time periods but the result is always the same, similart figures for page views but divided between a lower number of visitors. Does anyone know if this is a normal occurrence and is it simply down to inaccurate recording of data by Google?

My first guess would be that your cookie settings are different in webtrends than they are for Google Analytics. You can change the timeout settings and such if you are using software (enterprise) version, someone else would have to weigh in for the On-Demand service. If webtrends is set for 3h and google is set to 5 min you'll see a drastically lower count in webtrends. Most webtrends users don't have it set that high, but it's worth checking (I use a 3h setting).

As for visitors, I'm not sure that Google Analytics sets it's own cookie for unique visitor tracking. If not, that would be a large source of the discrepancy. If so, you should check to see how that cookie is set. If webtrends is set to use first party cookies but google is using 3rd party, you'll see google's count higher b/c 3rd party cookies are rejected more frequently and flushed more frequently than first party cookies, thus giving a higher count.