ga4 says 1,900 visitors, my server logs say 4,300 — which number do i plan with

At four thousand visits and twenty one signups, attribution is a hobby, not a discipline.

Add one optional field to the signup form asking how they came across it. Twenty one answers a month is a small number you can read in full, and reading twenty one sentences from real people will tell you more than any dashboard will at this scale. When you get to a few hundred a month, revisit.

Both are wrong and they are wrong in opposite directions, which is why the truth is between them and closer to the logs.

Your logs are inflated by bots, uptime checks, feed readers, link preview fetchers from every chat app, security scanners and browser prefetching. Deduplicating by IP and user agent does not remove any of that, it just tidies it.

The analytics number is deflated because the script has to load and be allowed to run. On a developer audience blocking is common enough that the gap you are describing is completely unremarkable, and if you show a consent banner in Europe, everyone who declines is missing on top of that. Reported losses of a third or more are normal for technical audiences, and worse when consent is involved.

What to do: strip known bot user agents and your own monitoring from the logs, and treat the result as an upper bound on humans. Treat analytics as a lower bound. Then plan with neither, because you have twenty one signups, and signups are counted server side by you and cannot be blocked. Use the ratio only to compare this month to last month, never as an absolute.

Moved to a lightweight first party script that does not use cookies and therefore does not need a banner. It still undercounts, because anything that runs in the browser can be blocked, but it undercounts by roughly the same amount every week.

That consistency is the entire value. Week over week decisions do not need an accurate number, they need a stable one. I stopped trying to know how many people visited and started only asking whether it went up.

Plan with signups and revenue. Everything above those in the funnel is directional at your volume.

Something I only worked out recently: the two tools are not even counting the same thing. One is counting people over the month and deduplicating them, the logs are counting requests and you turned those into something else with your own script. Before comparing, make sure both are actually pageviews of HTML pages, excluding assets, feeds, API calls and your own health endpoint. My gap halved once I stopped counting the RSS feed as a visitor.