Are the PrestaShop statistics right

If you are using PrestaShop, you must know that the numbers of visits announced by PrestaShop in its statistics are always huge, as if your site was visited by thousands of users. Not that I don't think your store is successful, but the truth is more nuanced.

Observation

It doesn't take long to realize that the numbers of visits put forward by the standard statistics present in PrestaShop are quite far-fetched.

Thus, a site which has just opened and which one seeks to refer on the search engines will know several thousands of visitors in a few weeks whereas tools of external statistics (Google analytics, Matomo) do not announce more than about twenty visits.

Why such a difference?

 It is quite simple to understand, PrestaShop counts all visits, strictly all. You, the other visitors, but especially, the robots.

Those bots that spend all day scanning the web for new and interesting pages to offer to humans, but also lots of bots that also scan the web for security holes and so on, thousands or millions of bots.

While external analytics services manage to differentiate humans from robots, well almost, because they manage to miss a lot of humans who don't want to be identified by these analytics services.

Conclusion

 It is true that the statistics presented by PestaShop are not what we, as merchants, expect and they can be difficult to understand for a beginner, yet they are as interesting as the statistics presented by outsourced services and I will explain why.

Conclusion +

We can say that there is no perfect system for statistics feedback, so we should take advantage of the proposed elements, as they are all important.

In the case of PrestaShop statistics, these data are interesting because they are easy to read and above all, even if their volume is false, their evolution is real and you can therefore precisely analyze trends over more or less long periods by comparing to the previous period.

This method is nothing extraordinary, but it allows you to remain serene and to really work on the long term and not on the present moment as the Internet world provokes.

How do you manage your statistics and what is your preferred method of analysis?