It seems to be working correctly as far as I can see. Your <Get loop="total" /> is running within the loop and your <Get loop=previous_total /> is running after the loop. In both cases they’re displaying the total number of items from the same loop, so it makes sense that they’d be the same. Wrapping that first one in some conditional logic won’t affect what it’s counting (the total number of items in the loop), it only changes in what context that variable gets set. That’s why in my example I filtered the loop using attributes to only loop through the items I wanted to count. If you aren’t able to filter the loop, then you’ll need to use the Math tag to increment a variable by one each time your conditional logic runs. You’ll also need to use the Math tag if you want to add up multiple loop totals.
Edit: here’s an example of how this might work from another thread: