Below are guesses.
The “Factory Worker” views could be one person who open the page and left it opened in their browser to return to later, along with a hundred other pages over the past month. I’m not sure about the technical side of this, only that browser tabs refresh for a variety of reasons in this situation. It’s difficult to know when those refreshes count as views. After the internet is reconnected? After account logout? Never?
(For the one-tab-only readers: Bookmarking be better, sure, but bookmark searches don’t always work, failing to match up the title and keywords using exact prompts. Needing to scroll through hundreds of bookmarks has its problems, too.)
To be clear, I’m not this person for “Factory Worker”, only that I’ve noticed this technical habits seem to coincide with a jump in “popularity” of the projects.
That shift in recommendations could also be coincidence, tho. People tend to pick up interest in the same topics at the same time….
For the mismatches: itch.io and Google track visitors differently. Google keeps massive amounts of data on us collected from trackers around the internet and maybe from offline, so their profiling might make for more accurate counts. Conversely, anti-Google trackers might reduce the Google Analytics numbers while itch.io isn’t as strongly affected.
For the lower count of total itch.io views compared to page views… that’s the strangest part. Any chance the account summary pages weren’t updated when the project summary was?