Why BobRay and other tools disagree

Put two analytics tools on one site and they will disagree, always, in both directions. These are the six systematic reasons, so you can stop reconciling and start trusting trends.

• Key takeaways
• Tools disagree by definition: sessions vs day-visits, cookie uniques vs daily tokens, bounce math.
• Consent-gated tools often report less than BobRay in the EU, we see decliners too.
• Pick one source of truth per question; compare each tool only to itself over time.

Definitional differences

• Sessions vs visits: our day-scoped visits regroup differently than 30-minute-timeout sessions.
• Uniques: cookie-based tools follow a person across days; our tokens reset daily, see cookie-free counting. Our daily uniques run conservative.
• Bounce: we count single-page, zero-event visits; tools that fire scroll events mark fewer bounces.

Collection differences

• Consent banners: tools that wait for consent miss everyone who declines or leaves first, often 20–40% in the EU. BobRay needs no consent, so it frequently reports more traffic than a consent-gated GA.
• Blockers: blocklists target tools differently; see the ad-blocker article.
• Bot filtering: each vendor's bot list differs; we filter known crawlers before counting.

What to do with this

Choose one tool as the source of truth per question, and compare each tool only to itself over time. Percentage changes, conversion rates, and rankings agree across tools far better than absolute counts ever will.

Common pitfalls

The mistakes we see most often on this topic, so you can skip them entirely.

• Reconciling absolute counts line-by-line, definitions make that impossible.
• Judging bounce across tools with different event auto-firing.
• Forgetting bot-filter differences before blaming an install.

Quick reference