Comparing Google Trends for Websites and Google Analytics data

Great post Ani!

It's absolutely amazing to see how both tools, and same owner, has different results. Moreover, I think somebody from Google should participate here and explain why GA tends to show more traffic for recent period of times.

Best,

JC

Hi Ani,
Do you know if choosing to share Google Analytics data with other Google Products improves the match of trends.

Did any of the sites you included in the post had GA data sharing enabled?

cheers,
Andrés

Good points Andrés
No idea if sharing GA data makes trends much closer but is quite logical.

I did not think about taking in consideration if data was shared for the sites I got the graphics. I can check in some but not all, let me see.

Thanks for drop by and comment.

Nice Blog. I liked it.

There's a small uproar going on in the world of online comics right now, as mentioned in this blog entry I wrote. Briefly, many major strips are claiming that although Google Trends shows long, steep declines for their sites, their Google Analytics disagree.

Some of your readers might find it interesting or want to comment, so here's the link:

http://floatinglightbulb.blogspot.com/2009/09/webcomic-readership-trends.html

Thanks for the interesting side-by-side reports. How did you get the sites to share their analytics with you (though you obviously agreed to keep them private)?

Thanks Bengo for your very specific article to online comics trends.

Managing a lot of Analytics accounts and keep the details private is the way I could capture and include graphs for the article.

It's absolutely amazing to see how both tools, and same owner, has different results. Really it is a nice blog .Thank you for sharing with us.

Nice page and its information are also great .Thank you for sharing with us.

I wish I'd found this post a few days ago. Ani. It would have prevented me writing at article for Crikey which used Google Trends data showing that traffic to Australia news websites was in serious decline, and then having to write another article saying I probably got it wrong.

I did request a response from Google Trends, but of course the US has been closed for the Thanksgiving long weekend.

The Google Trends forum is rather quiet. There were only three questions or comments posted for the whole of September, none of which received a reply, and nothing since. I can't see that anyone from Google has responded to anything for months and months??I gave up looking back any further.

Google Trends is a Google Labs product, i.e. an experiment. I'm starting to think that it's been abandoned and we're just seeing a slow degradation due to lack of maintenance.

Hi Stilgherrian
Interesting what you are saying but I don't think Trends is abandoned or in degradation, no matter if Google people say nothing in months, silence is a quite typical attitude from them.

Thanks for come and comment.

Maybe I am missing something, but the numbers in each of the graphs pretty much show numbers that are way way off in Google Trends. For example in the first set of graphs, one week of traffic in July for GA says the site is getting about 50,000 visitors, but Trends says that the same site is getting close to 3,500 visitors. WTF?

Correction to my last comment, I meant to say that Google Trends is saying that daily traffic at that time is 3500 so (3500*7 ) = 24500 weekly visitors. Still not even close to 50K visitors GA is reporting.