a note about statistics
I’ve noticed that several people (especially here) are saying that Sitemeter underreports your site’s statistics to the tune of 40-60%, and that my host’s internal statistics are probably far more accurate.
That’s kind of frustrating, as evolution wandered in the Blogspot wilderness for nearly two years, and all I had was a Sitemeter counter. When I moved to a real host (with a real stats program), I had 990 visits by Sitemeter’s reckoning. Now, my Sitemeter counter is sitting at 7,838.
On the other hand, my host’s reporting program (which directly analyzes the server’s logfiles) says that I have had 8,753 unique visitors who made 21,349 visits since 06.22.2004, which means (after figuring in the 990 Sitemeter visits from before then) I’ve had an estimated 23,000 visits since evolution began.
That just seems mind-boggling to me: that there were 23,000 occasions where it’s possible someone I don’t even know cared enough about something I said to sit and think about it for a while.
One number I am sure of though: evolution’s 1,000th post is around the corner. Look for it around 04.01.2005 or so.
02.16.2005 @ 16:52
When people say that Site Meter is under reporting, they are usually comparing Site Meter “visits” to something like “hits” or “page views” on their internal logs. If you can get your logs to only report the pages view counts for the pages where you’ve added the Site Meter counter and you remove any page views that were generated by spiders, it should be within about 5% of Site Meter’s “page view” count for your site. Here is a page that may help with the comparison.
http://www.sitemeter.com/?action=help&area=COMPARE
02.16.2005 @ 18:33
Awstats keeps track of visits, page views, and hits separately, and doesn’t count bots. My stats logs say I’ve had about 21,000 visits since June of ‘04.