Why Your Google Analytics Doesn’t Match Your Identified Visitors

Why Your Google Analytics Doesn’t Match Your Identified Visitors

When comparing Visual Visitor’s Identified Visitors to Google Analytics (GA), it’s common to notice different numbers — and that’s exactly what should happen. These two platforms measure completely different things and operate under different rules, standards, and data requirements.

Below is a breakdown of why your GA metrics will never (and should never) match your identified visitor counts.

1. Visual Visitor Uses Validated, Real-Time, Human Data

Our platform focuses on identifying actual people or companies who visit your website.
Because of this, we apply strict validation steps that reduce inflated or inaccurate numbers.

We filter out:
  1. Invalid emails
  2. Complainer / abuser emails
  3. Disposable or temporary inboxes
  4. Known spam traps
  5. Suspected bot interactions

This ensures you receive clean, usable, real-world data — not raw traffic.
GA, on the other hand, measures page hits, sessions, and general website activity, not validated identities.

Info
Visual Visitor will only capture US data of your email visitors.

For consumer-level identification, Visual Visitor requires that a user has opted in (accepted your Cookies.).

This means:
  1. If the user hasn’t given consent, they will not appear in +Person results
  2. GA will still count that visit as traffic

This naturally creates a discrepancy, and it’s intentional for privacy compliance.

3. Google Analytics Includes Bot Traffic and Broader Activity

GA captures:
  1. Bot activity
  2. Crawlers
  3. Scripted traffic
  4. App or device-level pings
  5. Accidental refreshes
  6. Interactions from outside the U.S.
  7. Traffic without emails

Visual Visitor does not include these in identified data.
Notes
Our job is to give you identities — not inflated numbers.
We actively work to block or filter automated traffic sources to keep your data clean.

4. GA Tracks Events, Sessions, and Behavior — Not People

Google Analytics is designed to measure:
  1. Sessions
  2. Pageviews
  3. Bounce rates
  4. Average time on site

Visual Visitor identifies:

  1. Companies visiting your site
  2. Employees at those companies (+Employee)
  3. Consumers visiting your site (+Person)
  4. Contacts tied to real, validated emails

So while GA tracks what happened, Visual Visitor tells you who did it.

Alert
The numbers will never align because the purpose and output of each tool are fundamentally different.

Bottom Line


Your Google Analytics should not match your Visual Visitor Identified Visitors — and if it did, that would be a problem.


Notes
GA measures total traffic activity.
Visual Visitor measures validated human identities.

Both tools serve different purposes, and together they provide a complete view of who is visiting and how they interact with your website.

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