Recently I have been running some experimental Seo Strategies on live.com V google V yahoo, now out of laziness I had analytics to monitor the stats installed. However it seemed to be a bit odd to me that I was not receving any traffic from live despite knowing I was turning up in the serps as expected with serp positions of 1-3 on reasonable phases.

Hmmm, why was I not getting any traffic, I have a little script that I can use to reconcile my analytics data against raw logs so I ran it and I was completly blown away by the results.

Google analytics did not record a single hit from Live but in my logs I could seen lots of hits with the expected keywords, so I tested it and used a few proxies, vpns etc. as well as my own servers to hit live and then my site!! After a week I can safely say that Google analytics is completly ignoring hits from Live.

Now I am a pragramattic person who does not go with the whole Google is evil theme (its just a company who is only interested in money, nothing wrong with that if they would stop pontificating) but I am not stupid either and I know if there is an issue queue and on the queue there is an issue "not reporting all live traffic" it might not get to the top of the list in a hurry !!

Now Matt will have some reasonable sounding explanation but I am not as smart as him and I see it like this:

1) Analytics is not showing any traffic from Live.com
2) I rank in the top 3 on live for 5 different terms that do deliver traffic (albeit small)
3) My apache logs are showing traffic for these terms
4) Awstats is showing Live traffic
5) I know the traffic came as some of it was me

So in short, get awstats or similar installed asap if you want to see any traffic from Live.

Edit: No its not just filtering the msn/live bot spam, I did initially think it was just this but subsequent test showed it to be a much wider issue.