I received a strange question today. A user was telling me how critical it is that their analytics plugin, Jetpack Stats, works in a specific way with WooCommerce. This got me thinking – wait – why do you need Jetpack Stats? What happens if you ever switch away from WordPress? What if you continue to use WordPress but WordPress.com goes out of business? Am I the only one that worries about these issues?
Good Reasons to Use Jetpack Stats
I use Jetpack Stats on my site but they're really just for fun. I like the pretty graph on my WordPress dashboard and I like that you can drill pretty deep from within the WordPress admin. If you do you use different analytics software then you can also compare the two and see how some pieces of analytics work better for certain types of data. All of these are really great reasons to use the Jetpack Stats. But no matter how good Jetpack Stats get I'm not going to use it as my main site analytics.
Good Reasons to Use Google Analytics
You should definitely use analytics that aren't tied to a specific content management system. Someday that CMS might not exist anymore and you don't want your stats to disappear do you? WordPress is great, WordPress is easy, and I think WordPress is changing the world but I don't for a second think that it'll last forever. Using a 3rd party analytics software can protect your data.
If you're into the fancy dashboard analytics like Jetpack offers, there's a plugin for that.
Don't Blackberry Yourself
In 2007 Blackberry's sales were up and businesses everywhere loved them. Now they're not even mentioned in most Android Vs iOS articles. In 7 short years Blackberry has gone from the top of the market straight to the bottom.
No one saw this coming it just happened. People didn't even know they wanted a iPhone before they were revealed. Blackberry was a step behind the game and in the IT world that can kill you in an instant.
Should WordPress ever start to lose popularity among web developers, or if you ever need to switch away from WordPress then you have that data ready to go. So don't worry about WordPress stats plugins. They're fun, they look cool, and they're easy to set up, but should you use then you'll have your data locked away. Data you might not be able to get back. Don't do that to yourself if you don't have to. At least make a “backup” of your data with Google Analytics.
Do you trust Jetpack analytics?
What do you mean? I see no harm in getting stats from two different providers (Jetpack + Google Analytics).
ok patrick thanks for yor great blog post i will use getpack and analytics
I recently started using JetPack and it really made my site slow to load even when i’m on a dedicated server and all the other sites loaded faster. I’m switching back to analytics for sure.
Hey Jason,
I really can’t see how Stats would slow down your site. Before you disabling Jetpack entirely I’d try disabling all of the modules except Stats and give it another go.
My website’s Jetpack Stats (views) are almost half less than page views shown on Google Analytics. Whats going on?
They use two very different ways of calculating visitors. Here are some of the reasons why Jetpack and Google Analytics show different numbers.
I’d worry less about the actual numbers and more about the direction you’re moving in. I hope that helps! 🙂
Thanks Patrick, Your article helped me understand the difference as I was confused when I saw different results on Google analytic and JetPack stats.
Your last comment with the link to reasons why they both show different numbers is very useful. Thanks again! 🙂
This article and comment thread are exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a million, Patrick.
Hi Patrick, I just started blogging a little over a month ago. My GA stats are drastically smaller than my JetPack stats. This is very worrisome…I don’t know which one to trust or why this is happening?
Hey Anne,
They both track visits in different ways. I wouldn’t worry about the absolute numbers. I would look at the growth over time.
Great Job 🙂
This is a biased opinion towards google analytics. How can you rely on a company which controls your monetization, shows you the stats itself and does everything itself without any third party involvement? I don’t think Google analytics are accurate measures for both advertisers and publishers. Google has complete control and can manipulate your figures with just single click. I think you guys should Jet Pack and one or mre other analytics as well to compare what is going on with your blog. I have compared Facebook, Google, goo.gl, jet pack and I have found Google analytics are pathetic. They show less page views to publishers and more to advertisers. The company is sucking money and I believe it will be revealed one day.
I think Google Analytics runs circles around Jetpack Stats. Yes, the pretty graphs are good to see in WP-Admin, but apart from that there is not much data that’s available in Jetpack stats.
I prefer to use Google Analytics Counter Tracker plugin on WordPress. It is Very simple and easy to use.You can Connect your Google Analytics account and get Google Analytics stats; Group stats by hour, day, month and year.
Sadly Google Analyticator plugin no longer works. Got any alternative?
Yup. The go-to is Monster Insights (free & premium versions).
i think Google Analytics is better than Jetpack
I finding GA a little difficult to understand. And Jetpacks shows me easily what I want to know. Should I give more time to learn GA?
Thanks!
Hey Melissa,
Man good question. Google Analytics is massive. You could spend an hour learning & exploring each day for a year and you still wouldn’t know everything. Here’s the thing. It’s massive and somewhat complex. But it’s also free and if you do want to dig into more advanced reports someday you’ll want that data.
So I definitely think it’s worth setting up even if you mostly check your stats in Jetpack for now.
Good luck!
Both sets of tools are great, but what I absolutely love about Jetpack is that it has a native function that shows you outbound clicks from your site. I may be wrong, but I believe that for GA, you need to insert additional code into your site to be able to do that.
You can actually do this with Google Analytics pretty easily. With Monster Insights (free) you can track outbound links by checking one setting. Definitely recommend turning it on.
Jetpack has been getting the stats between two different sites I manage all mixed up. I’m about to be done with it all together.
hey, right now I have both jetpack and google analytics by monsterinsights on my site. can I have both for few days and will that slow down my site if I have both?
Neither of those will slow down your site. They’re so small it’s negligible.