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bit.ly and wordpress stats

  1. fracas
    Member

    A question for all you smartie pantses out there:

    If I post a link (to an article on my blog) on twitter, but using a url shortening app like bit.ly, will it affect the stats for that post?

    I ask because today I posted a link to my Friday Food Porn post over at twitter and used bit.ly to shorten the url. Bit.ly shows you how many clicks you've gotten for that link, and that tells me one number, yet when I check the stats in my dashboard for that post, it shows a smaller number than what bit.ly is telling me has clicked through for that link.

    Does someone know the answer to this?

    LOL... I feel too old to figure out something new every day.

    The blog I need help with is fracas.wordpress.com.

  2. raincoaster
    Member

    Yes.

    The Twitter stats do not include all clicks from twitter because all intermediaries like bit.ly, tinyurl, etc, count as one stop. They are not separated out, so your assigned Twitter stats are always significantly less than your actual twitter hits.

  3. raincoaster
    Member

    Also, if someone clicks away from/shuts down the window before Angela, the little smiley, loads, it does not count as a hit on WP.com stats.

  4. fracas
    Member

    Hi raincoaster!

    Okay, so what would the intermediaries register as on the dashboard referrer list?

  5. raincoaster
    Member

    Nothing, that I can find. They simply don't show up at all. The total is accurate, but not the referrer stats because bitly etc don't show at all.

  6. traffordeco
    Member

    I'm finding the totals don't work either - on a new blog I'm getting WP saying "5 views" and bitly saying "30 clicks"

    So are all those people navigating away before the stats load?

  7. traffordeco
    Member

    I'm finding the totals don't work either - on a new blog I'm getting WP saying "5 views" and bitly saying "30 clicks"

    So are all those people navigating away before the stats load?

  8. raincoaster
    Member

    Which blog?

  9. mzwednesdaykennedy
    Member

    'I feel too old to figure out something new every day'...can I relate to that:)) he he

  10. elliotross
    Member

    I have the same question

    bit.ly says;
    Added Aug 18

    Clicks 8 Out of8

    Info Shoulder Surfing (Your Web Site) « A Dime a .

    Blog stats show no hits to that post

  11. t3ck
    Member

    The best way to see the amount of hits from a tiny URL that Links to your wp.com article is to use the new Short URL provided for your article because it's tied into the stats system.

    here is the official article WP.me — shorten your links

  12. elliotross
    Member

    Damn yer good :-)

    Chalk that up to error between chair & keyboard -

    Thank you!

  13. t3ck
    Member

    You're welcome!

  14. kazvorpal
    Member

    Because I'm seeing a gigantic disparity between what bit.ly reports and what wp reports, I have no intention of using the wp.me links:

    Right now, bit.ly says that it's gotten 28 clicks on my link from yesterday, yet that article is reported by wp as having received 14 views. Another article has 16 on bit.ly, 8 on wp. Now I am wondering if there's some reason for a static ratio, but the next one has 4 on bit.ly and 1 on wp.

    What's more, when I've actually checked the two links, bit.ly has actually been shorter than wp.me, and I tend to need to make every character count.

  15. raincoaster
    Member

    As staff has reported in other threads, bit.ly includes bots and spiders, whereas the WordPress.com stats do not. That is the largest source of a discrepancy between the two numbers, so which one you prefer depends on what you're looking at the numbers for in the first place.

  16. kazvorpal
    Member

    I find it unlikely that 14 spiders visited that article in my blog in 24 hours...especially since the numbers increased in proportion to the accumulation of readers.

  17. thesacredpath
    Member

    I'll just throw this out there for what it's worth.

    I have AWStats on my self-hosted blog via cPanel, and I can track the bots that hit my blog. I have my robots.txt file set to prevent bots from hogging my bandwidth. They can only visit once per hour (which is the same delay wordpress.COM has set for all the blogs here).

    Googlebot ends up hitting my blog (short periods each time) on average about 15-25 times per day and I've seen it as high as 35 average per day. Google used to be at the top, but lately Yahoo Slurp is hitting me at 150% of googlebots rate, and Bing/MSN is climbing fast.

    There is a total of 16 bots that crawl up my blog continuously each month. Some only hit once or twice a month and some once or twice a week, but Google Yahoo, Bing/MSN, and Ask always hit my blog daily, and in most cases multiple times per day.

  18. raincoaster
    Member

    I find it entirely believeable, or as tsp says, a bit low. When I used to have sites with those kinds of stats I found that anywhere between 40-80% of my hits were from bots.

  19. thesacredpath
    Member

    /nod to raincoaster

    Yes, the total number of bot hits per day are quite high, and mine used to be much higher until I blocked a couple of research bots from Universities and limited how often they could crawl my site. The numbers above were for the googlebot only.

  20. kazvorpal
    Member

    What I find especially suspicious is that this new blog was only getting 1 to 4 hits per day, for a week or so...then I started getting far more followers on twitter, and suddenly the number of hits increased to 16, then 28, on those very two days.

    Is there a reason why the spiders would ignore my blog until I started getting twitter followers on the account where I announce its daily articles?

  21. raincoaster
    Member

    Yes. The same things which are bringing more people to your Twitter feed are bringing bots as well. The more people rt you and Follow you (which links to you off their Profile), the more visibility you're going to have to bots.

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