When recovering from bot traffic, which analytics should you rely on: Google Analytics or your web host?
For reporting on audience behavior, Google Analytics (GA4) should be treated as the primary source. Hosting-level analytics such as Kinsta are best used for infrastructure monitoring and usage limits, not for measuring real user growth.
Why Google Analytics and hosting analytics don’t match
Google Analytics filters known bot traffic, while hosting analytics count all requests to the server, including bots and scrapers. At the same time, ad blockers prevent a significant portion of human visitors from being recorded in GA. This means hosting analytics tend to overcount activity, while GA tends to undercount actual users.
If you’re still noticing anomalies that you suspect may be bot traffic in Google Analytics:
Even with GA4’s built-in bot filtering and the measures already in place, some automated traffic can still surface in analytics. This may include referral spam that affects acquisition data, “ghost” spam that injects events without visiting the site, or more advanced bots that closely mimic human behavior and are harder to distinguish.At this stage, addressing residual anomalies typically involves deeper analysis, such as refining custom filters, reviewing traffic patterns at a more granular level, or implementing additional server-side or bot-detection strategies to further reduce noise in reporting.If these issues continue to impact analytics, Cornershop Creative can support further investigation and configuration to improve data accuracy. Depending on the scope, this work may be covered under your existing support plan or may require a more dedicated effort, which we can review together as needed.
Further reading if you’d like to learn more about how bot traffic affects analytics:
Google Analytics Help: Known bot-traffic exclusion
Blobr: How Does Google Analytics Filter Out Bots and Ensure Accurate Data?
Blobr: Does Adblock Block Google Analytics? How It Impacts Your Website’s Data Tracking