The truth about blog visitor numbers.
Many years ago on a galaxy far away I founded an Internet business - after a little while I discovered an interesting metric for our business. For every 100 visitors to our website 20 downloaded our trial software, of those twenty, five then bought it - which gave us an income of £500. Therefore every visitor was worth £5 to us. I quickly moved into the role of Marketing Guru and web expert and kept pumping those visitor numbers up. When we went to ask those very nice men in the city for a few million quid I would wave the graph about and say look - I can keep the numbers rising through my magic understanding of Google and ker-ching will go the cash register. Of course it all went wrong soon after they handed us a cheque but that is another story.
But I do know about measuring visitor numbers and the tools are a load of rubbish inconsistent - (the men in the braces never asked me to justify the numbers).
As an example Verve Hosting who host this blog give you three programs to analyse your stats - I also have Sitemeter running and Google measures it through Adsense and Analytics.
So let's compare the figures for the last seven days:
Sitemeter: 4368 Visits 6636 Pages
Google Adsense 5988 Pages
Google Analytics 3754 Visits 5535 Pages
(The latter may be disadvantaged as its counting script is the last to load and the page may have hung before then.)
But reading from the server logs:
Webalyser 25648 Visits 54724 Pages - Wow!
Awstats 9503 Visits 24520 Pages
Analog 27678 Pages
I seem to remember when I was doing presentations as to how great I was at growing traffic I used Webalyser.
So just remember when you see any blogger boasting about traffic numbers - they are wrong - they are just an indicator...
(And the new counter on the right is the total visits so far recorded by the Server- a prize for when it hits a million!)