Google Analytics is lying to you

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in Analytics.

I'm not sure that the comparisons here are apple-to-apple. The first graph compares "visits counted in WP Engine Blogs" versus "Sessions counted by Google Analytics". How does WP Engine Logs count visits? Analytics uses a specific deduplication scheme for sessions -- e.g., a user visiting twice within 30 minutes only counts as one session.

There are ways to explain how visits would show in logs but not in analytics, but I find it difficult to believe that 2/3 of these blog visitors are using a tool that blocks requests to Analytics.

I dont know what processing wp is doing to track "real" visitors via logs. But I have rolled my own analitics and I had the same discrepancy as the article from GA when using server side visitor tracking. Once I started to only track visitors who actually rendered and loaded our javascript it was only 1 to 3 percent discrepancy. My guess is the logs are picking up way more bots that dont load javascript.