May 28, 2004
Trafficking in numbers
(Category:
Weblog Stuff
)
A post over at A Small Victory (It's about an article in the New York Times that basically equates bloggers with underarm dandruff. Michele rips it apart really nicely - you should read it.) prompted me to do a comparison check on my Sitemeter Recorded vs. Actual visitors. For ZeroIntelligence.net I came up with these:
Visits* recorded by Sitemeter: 66,411
Actual visits** from log analysis: 136,362
* Site Meter defines a visit as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.
** A visitor is counted only when bringing up more than one page and taking no longer than 30 minutes between individual pages.
So Sitemeter is trying to count more sessions as visits (criteria of one page view versus a criteria of two or more page views) but is actually ending up with less than half (49%) of the actual visits.
Does anybody else out there have actual numbers they can compare to see what percentage of their visits are getting recorded by Sitemeter?
Posted by Jim | Permalink
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Someone at munuviana recommended StatCounter. With that one, you can specify the lag time between page loads to decide what gets counted as a true "visit." But frankly, I quit looking very closely at either counter. If I'm updating, I'm pissed that the numbers aren't higher; if I'm not updating, well, then I really have no business expecting much from the stats.
I'm with Ilyka. I have given up checking. My stats seem fixed at a certain range, and almost never goes up, despite a firestorm of comments, and people that tell me that they read me constantly. So I figure-hell with it. I'm just writing for the free therapy, anyway.
I'm pretty much the same. I gave up on regular checks, looking at referral logs and stuff like that a while ago when it just got too busy to keep up with it.
However, I go through some longer periods without feedback so I keep an occasional eye on the hits to make sure people are still visiting.
And to make sure I stay ahead of Helen. ;-P
I appreciate the question because, as a pit bull, I gotta know everything! I have always wondered why the "hits" that sitemeter counts are much less than the total on the free referrer log thingie. And why the difference with gostats and extreme tracking? And how/who counts the bot hits? And why does it seem like nobody reads the site sometimes and at other times *somebody* must be reading cuz there are comments, but the hit count goes *down*? And what should I look for when I go to cpanel at my server, anyway? And who put the ram in the ramma-ramma-ding-dong? Really! I gotta know!
You ARE still ahead of me, and it annoys me terribly, baby. :)
my site meter is always off... but i usually get 5k hits a month... such a small number..
The various third party counters all have different numbers because they're all effective to different levels. It's a crap shoot whether a particular page load will actually be counted because they're trying to catch it after the fact. Your logs are accurate because they're recording the actual request for a page load, not the successful loading and processing of an offsite script or image.
I'm curious if other people's counts are as drastically off as mine are.
Oh, and it was me with the ramma-ramma-ding-dong. What can I say? I was young and in an experimental phase.