Keeping Track of Comings and Goings

I was just about to send an email to Coble about this and then I realized I couldn’t remember if it was her that I’d been talking to about this or someone else.  So, on the chance that it is someone else, I’m just posting it here instead.

At Blogger, I used Sitemeter for a long, long time and then, on the advice of Tim Morgan, I added Stat Counter.  Now, I have Squarespace’s stats.

And here’s what I’ve learned.  If you are using Sitemeter, it’s probably underreporting the number of hits you have.  When I was at Blogger, the difference between the Sitemeter count and the Stat Counter count was about fifty.  Some days it was closer to 100.

I had this theory for a long time that Stat Counter’s timer must have been different than Sitemeter’s–that Stat Counter had a shorter amount of time someone could be away from Tiny Cat Pants and return and get counted as a new hit.  And that may be part of it.

But I was also doing side-by-side IP address comparisons* and it was clear that Stat Counter was recording IP addresses that Sitemeter wasn’t.

When I left Blogger, I was averaging about 375 hits a day according to Stat Counter.  According to Sitemeter, it was closer to 300.  About half of these were search engine hits for people looking for porn or whatever.  And half of them were you, dear readers.

Now that I’m over here, I have this window where I’m not getting very many (four total) search engine hits at all, so I can see how many actual people are here a day–about 200 of you.

Assuming Squarespace’s numbers are the most accurate, this would indicate to me that Stat Counter was also pretty accurate as, if there are about 200 of you, and about half of my hits used to be coming from searches, 375 or so hits a day seems to be closer to the truth of the matter.

So, all this is to say that if you’re only using Sitemeter, you may have more readers than you think you do.

 

 

*Because I am a giant nerd.