January 17, 2005

Too Much Time on My Hands

OK - so I've been checking on my traffic. Come on...let's be honest - we all do that every now and again. Well today I'm doin' it.

Hmmm.........there seems to be a difference of opinion.

Let's look at this, shall we?

Sitemeter:

Average hits per day: 95 as of today.
Since this site started: showing a total of 17, 226 visits
Total pages viewed: 36,904

Not bad....but let's look at the meter attached to my host (GoDaddy.com) Traffic Facts. This is actually for professional sites.

Total number of hits: 59, 612 as of yesterday
Total unique hits: 19,490 as of yesterday
Total pages viewed: 113,794
Ave. visits per day - not available.

That's one hell of a difference, don't ya think?

I just thought it was interesting. I know we have this discussion every now and again, and I'm also aware that Sitemeter is less than reliable. I'm just amazed at such a drastic difference.

Posted by Tammi at January 17, 2005 01:07 PM
Comments

Site Meter doesn't count robots and spiders.

Posted by: Kathy K at January 17, 2005 02:31 PM

Too...many...numbers...

I am so not a stats person. Sitemeter makes my brain hurt ;-)

Posted by: Sally at January 17, 2005 02:45 PM

I know that Sitemeter doesn't match Typepad's stats. About 8,000 less. Nice site, BTW. Popped in from Ogre's.

Posted by: William Teach at January 17, 2005 09:42 PM

Site Meter is flawed. If a person inters directly into one of your posts Site Meter will not register the hit. It only counts those hits which come through your frontpage.

Easy solution, place the code for Site Meter in each post.

Take a look at my site. My hits per day more than doubled when I did this.

Hope this helps

SlagleRock Out!

Posted by: SlagleRock at January 17, 2005 09:46 PM

i live in my sitemeter. i always have a tab opened to it, i know i'm ridiculously vain. so what.

anyway. the avg visits & siteviews is for the week only.

typepad's stats suck, they count every page view as a hit.

i have my sitemeter set up to not count visits from me, and my host's stat counter counts my visits. i usually have a big difference, too.

my sitemeter counts it when people hit individual posts, but that may have something to do with the way my blog is set up. no matter what post you go to, you always get the same sidebars and the banner.

/disjointed comment

Posted by: sarahk at January 18, 2005 06:42 AM

I don't mind that Sitemeter undercounts. It helps keep me humble.

As does the fact that half my traffic is Google hits.

Which I guess wouldn't bother me so much, except I can tell from the search terms that people aren't finding what they're looking for :-(

Posted by: Harvey at January 18, 2005 09:43 AM

There's few google search terms that DON'T get a hit on Harvey's pages...

Posted by: Ogre at January 18, 2005 01:41 PM