Saturday, April 13, 2013

Blog Numbers



I have a StatCounter button down at the bottom, which gives a tally of total page hits since it was installed. One can open the program and parse the stuff, find them on a map, total by day or week, first-time viewers versus returns, like that. When I started it, the numbers were low, then gradually they moved up to around 15,000 hits a month and leveled off.

Except that about four months ago, the numbers fell dramatically. Instead of five hundred hits a day, I was getting between two and three hundred. Huh. Maybe I'd worn out my welcome ...

No big deal, and I went on about my business. Then I happened across a stat counter on the Blogger page itself, buried down in the Settings. So I clicked on that, just to see what it showed, and oddly enough, those numbers were averaging twice as high as the StatCounter's.

Whereas StatCounter says total hits yesterday were 252, Blogger says 455.

Hmm.  Somebody seems to be counting something that somebody else isn't. I wonder which, if either, is right ... ?

2 comments:

The Daring Novelist said...

I have several stat counters, and I find they all count different things.

One of them filters out the "stats spam" bots completely, but also filters out a lot of legit traffic. Another seems to reflect RSS activity. Another seems to be more persnickety about how it counts each page hit within a visit.

Even with Google: the stats from Blogger don't match Google Analytics.

So a big change could be that one or both of your stats counters adjusted an algorithm to either exclude something or include something.

Anonymous said...

Don't know what effect it has on your end, but Ghostery says that statcounter is trying to lay a tracking cookie on my machine, and rejects it.