Tuesday
Are Your Stats Accurate?
 We all like to have some form of tracker or hits counter on our blogs but are they accurate? Well I guess they can't be as they give differing statistics.When I first started blogging I used eXTReMe Tracking. This worked fine until I started using hit exchanges such as Blog Soldiers, Blog Mad and Blog Explosion Any hits from these sources weren't registered. I tried also running sitemeter and the hit exchange traffic was then captured. Though I've long forgotten hit exchanges - they only give artificial, cosmetic traffic - I still have problems getting accurate figures. On my celebrity blog my IceRocket tracker often shows nearly 1000 additional visitors to eXTReMe Tracking - but as far as Google Analytics goes, along with Alexa, they seem to reckon that the blog is getting only 100 or 200 hits a day when in reality it's attracting several thousand. I get more Google clicks than they say I have hits! My celebrity blog Alexa Ranking is therefore way adrift. It's all a bit confusing. Actually though I try not to get too bogged down by studying statistics. I'd rather spend my allotted blog time doing something practical that might just earn some money. Of course it's useful to see such things as the number of visits, page reads and how many clicks there are on on the varying adverts - though not all trackers do this. MyBlogLog does and also FeedBurner has interesting stats for free. In the end though, if you have a money making blog it's the money you make that's the important statistic. It's so easy to get sidetracked into various statistical measurements and rankings and forget what the real reason is for blogging. Stay on track. Good luck, Mike. Labels: Blogs, Money, money making, Statistics |
One thing I have noticed is that since my stat tracking code is that the bottom of my blog, if there is another widget or ad that slows down the loading of the bottom of the page due to a slow server, a user may have already clicked somewhere else by the time my tracking code gets loaded thus deflating my traffic numbers.
Mike, have you got the november check from voxant?
Alexa is problematic because they estimate your traffic based on people with the Alexa toolbar on their computers going to your site. Most of the people with the Alexa toolbar are techies/webmasters. Therefore if you get a lot of traffic from this group, Alexa will record all of it and assume you are doing really well.
However, most of Google users don't have the toolbar, so Alexa will only capture a fraction of traffic from search engines. It's even worse if the type of blog you have attracts the over 55 crowd, as most of them haven't even heard of Alexa let alone downloaded the toolbar!
I was also wondering what kind of tracker to use to monitor my sites.
Just started to track using Google Analytics and not much data on it yet.
I like this paragraph "In the end though, if you have a money making blog it's the money you make that's the important statistic. It's so easy to get sidetracked into various statistical measurements and rankings and forget what the real reason is for blogging."
Guess i will focus on making a money making blog then..
Many thanks for the comments. Thanks for that bit about Alexa, teatreebergamot - interesting. And BudgetBoy I think something like that is messing up my stats.
As regards Voxant.
I've now had three checks okay:
$126.80
$155.98
$200.36
Thanks all,
Mike.
Strangely enough I was wading through some stats yesterday with a view to writing a post about how wildly skewed the data is in Analytics when compared to raw server data.
As an example, Analytics showed c.40,000 page views whereas my server stats suggested somewhere closer to 400,000!
I've yet to find a stats package that works well enough to a level that I trust...
I agree with you mike..
SOmetimes stats make us pressure especially when it shows that our blog not get huge amount of traffic... ANd like you said the most important thing is money...
I wonder why they differ so much. I am also concentrating more on thinking about money generated. What's the point in generating loads of visitors if they don't click ads?
Mike, Shy Guy and April - thanks for the comments.
Mike.
Getting reliable stats is key for me, I run sitemeter and feedburner post level statistics code and it seems to be fairly accurate (usually comes within 1% of adsense reported impressions).