Reddit Reveals Its Google Analytics Data to Call Out Inaccurate Analytics Services

You may have heard about Reddit’s financial troubles of late. The social news aggregator has been having trouble keeping up with traffic and sent out a plea to its users for help. The move worked, to a degree, but it hasn’t solved the cause of its problems. So Reddit is now trying to set the record straight by revealing just how much traffic it’s getting in the hopes that it would persuade advertisers who are more likely to rely on inaccurate analytics services.

“More than 8,000,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 400,000,000 pageviews. This is a typical month for us. In fact, our numbers would have been even higher if not for some site issues at the end of June.These numbers are very accurate, because there's a blob of Google Analytics javascript on every reddit page that lets them directly measure our traffic,” Reddit said.

Providing a Google Analytics screen shot for proof, the site says it gets about 8 million unique visitors per month. And that its page view count is at about 280 million. Despite this, the site says, advertisers are more likely to use third-party services to get an idea of the kind of traffic Reddit gets.

“The problem is, advertisers generally don't trust Google Analytics numbers. They have their own preferred sources of traffic information that they put their faith in,” Reddit continued. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if the numbers reported by the analytics companies wouldn’t be so far off.

The company goes on to list several analytics services and how much traffic they’re reporting. Compete shows 927,000 unique visitors per month, significantly lower than what Reddit is claiming. Quantcast shows 10 million non-unique visits per month, which Reddit says is two to four times lower than what its actually getting.

And they’re not the only two services with inaccurate reporting. If what Reddit says is true, and there’s no reason to doubt it, then it’s easy to see why the site would be frustrated by this, it affects the bottom line. Reddit doesn’t have a solution for the problem and doesn’t speculate on why the discrepancies are so large, but has revealed the data to at least get the ball moving and maybe start a discussion.