Comments on: Blog Traffic Metrics

By: Mark Gisleson

Mark Gisleson — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 22:16:33 +0000

I finally registered by blog URL (used to piggyback it onto my business site) and found immediately that Sitemeter undercounted by at least 50%, but it also appears to me that Sitemeter counts non-IE browser traffic at an even lower rate.

I appreciate Sitemeter but I don't understand Bear's thinking that there's no way to measure site traffic accurately. Of course there is! You can't access my site(s) without my ISP knowing it, and Webalizer counts that traffic just fine.

By: The View From The Nest

The View From The Nest — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:15:36 +0000

First sighting: "Close Enough For CBS Work"

O U C H!

By: Wizbang

Wizbang — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 19:30:16 +0000

Mini Bloggage II
Mini Bloggage n Bigger than a linkfest but smaller than a full blog post. ** A while back I put up a post about the latest jobs numbers and Murdoc of murdoconline.com noticed that the BLS' own numbers did not...

By: The Smoking Room

The Smoking Room — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 02:22:35 +0000

Measure my rage!
If you blog and use SiteMeter to keep track of your site's traffic, read this post on SiteMeter's unreliability. I had no idea about this issue, but when Michael Totten...

By: Bithead

Bithead — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:32:43 +0000

Trouble is if you wanna be listed on The Bear's system ya gots to be on SiteMeter.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:31:24 +0000

Also..I agree with Zed, if you're just blogging for stats and have people view your blog, please stop blogging than. I check my stats now and then to see if there is any spike in it. If so I will see if I have any trackbacks, so I can thank the person or track back to them to return the favor.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:29:42 +0000

I would never, ever use Webalizer. I have my own web server and it's not accurate at all. It produces 5x as much traffic as I get. What I think it does is count the references to your site and count it as a hit. For example if your blog link is mentioned in someones website, the number of people who view that entry on someone elses blog, it counts as one hit.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 22:44:24 +0000

Once a month or so I'll log onto sitemeter mid-day and it will say zero hits for the last hour, so I know it is down because I get enough traffic to assume that someone is always stopping by. I figure it goes down from time to time, and that is part of the problem.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 22:16:24 +0000

How cool! The software interpreted my asterisks put around words for emphasis as a bold tag. That's a nice touch.

By: jen

jen — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:55:34 +0000

I use StatCounter.com and find that it's closer to my server stats than SiteMeter ever was. It's easier to read the data as well.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:34:43 +0000

I have seen clear indicators of Site Meter being off, sometimes hugely, and at its worst during particularly heavy traffic. I wrote about it once upon a time. Basically if you take your tally at the end of one day, subtract it from your tally at the end of the next day, and compare to Site Meter's number of hits it says you got for the day, they only match some of the time. I saw over, I saw under, I saw matches, but on the whole it was under, by enough to add up over the course of time.

It is worst during a lanche of whatever kind, and that was how I noticed it.

So I take Site Meter to be an approximation, and to be perhaps internally consistent enough that comparing the relative traffic of two blogs that use it is close enough for CBS work. I think it's pretty safe to say that if I get 200,000 hits per SM in 2 years, and you get 2 million hits per SM in 2 years, that you did get close enough to ten times the traffic I got.

It also never helps when it goes down. It tends to do that *right before a milestone* in uncanny fashion. About to hit 500,000? Watching the meter and referrers to see who wins the mention in a post? So sorry! The meter will stop just before 500,000 and mess with your plans.

By: reliapundit

reliapundit — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:27:35 +0000

i have noticed that sitemeter is ALWAYS off by 50% compared to extreme tracking!

why is this so - and why is it so much like what totten avows?

i think that the lefties bloggers have hacked a filter on to sitemeter which does this to rightie bloggers (and DOUBLES their traffic stats, too --- how else could kjos - who's a moron - have numbers twice as high as glenn!?!?). iot's this, or sitemeter is doing it themselves.

i've also noticed that sitemeter consitently misses some links that i know work because i have used them/tested them.

i think that someone is deliberately effing with the stats because the leftie bloggers got caught trying to eff with the wizbang web awards.

By: Zed

Zed — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 20:37:08 +0000

I'm not sure if I like webalizer or awstats better, I like having them both to compare with analog which is pretty cheesy, webalizer seems to be more consistant but awstats will give a complete search engine list for every search phrase which brought viewers to your site as opposed to webalizers top 20. I like having them both to compare to each other. I don't even use sitemeter, I don't feel I'm missing anything other than my readers having any idea what my traffic is. But I really don't care about that.

By: Chris Short

Chris Short — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 20:25:51 +0000

I use Webalizer on my server. Direct log analysis. Nothing better in my opinion either. SiteMeter is something I'm testing out this month and so far I'm really not impressed with it AT ALL.