Dashboard Stats vs Site Meter stats
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Hi – I’m probably being really dumb here but my dashboard stats – feed stats and page view stats – seem to be way off the mark from my site meter stats? My understanding is that the dashboard measures pages viewed rather than visitors (ie ip addresses) but even taking that into account it seems not to add up?
Thanks
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Hi Claire
WP dashboard stats exclude page views by yourself which may explain why SiteMeter reports higher numbers.
HTH
Andy
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WP dashboard stats exclude page views by yourself which may explain why SiteMeter reports higher numbers.
only if you’re logged in, of course.
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Er, site meter is set to ignore visits from my IP and it actually records lower numbers than the dashboard stats. Still puzzled.
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I’m in the same boat as clairemillir — SiteMeter reports far _fewer_ hits/page views than the dashboard Blog Stats report. As of this moment today, for example, Blog Stats says I’ve had 36 hits, whereas SiteMeter says I’ve had *3*.
As clairemillir points out, SiteMeter can also be set to ignore our own visits, so that’s not a source of the problem.
So, what’s the source of the difference? If we were able to use the full-fledged SiteMeter (which logs IP addresses) and Blog Stats also did IP logging, we could at least start by figuring out whether one of the two services is over- or under-counting.
Perhaps some enterprising person at WordPress who has access to the IP information could do a little audit here or there, and start tracking down the source of this discrepancy?
Cheers.
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And yes, while it’s sort of not important, a factor of ten matters to me. Someday I hope to have a few hundred readers (my blog is on a very specialized subject so it will never be very big), and when that day comes, I’ll care very much whether it’s 20 or 200, and I’ll want to know for sure.
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I am not sure how such a discrepancy can arise. I used sitemeter once for a couple of weeks and the page views in sitemeter were same as the blog stats from wordpress.
So, make sure you check the page views rather than unique visits. -
my only thought is the same – page views vs unique visits.
the wordpress hit counter shows page views, so one person could generate several hits.
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There is no way for us to give you the exact same number as SiteMeter because we measure things differently. It’s probably best not to worry about it. :-)
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SiteMeter counts page views too; those numbers don’t match up either.
Curious to know: In what way are the SiteMeter count of pageviews and the Blog Stats count measured “differently”? The definition of a pageview seems the same wherever you are.
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How about contacting http://sitemeter.com and getting the specifics from them on both “paid” and “unpaid” accounts? Then you can send in a report of what you find out directly to sysadmin either through feedback or by emailing support@wordpress.com.
P.S. andy is inviting feedback on the wordpress beta stats prject through the use of your feedback button. -
Thank you for the constructive suggestion. I have queries out to sitemeter as well.
I’ll also be keeping an ear open on this end, hoping to hear about the technical details of the measurement differences between SiteMeter and WordPress.com blog stats — from andy’s posting above, I infer that he already knows the difference.
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@ouroboros
We have also had staff from sitemeter chime in here on the forum too so I’d say that you have covered all possible bases. ;) -
My sitemeter stats show me number of visits AND number of page views. I have it set to ignore my visits. I also have the paid version – I wanted to be able to see more than the last one hundred visits to my blog, with the paid you can see up to 4000 visits plus where they are located, and the ISP plus a lot of other useful information. Because of the inability to use javascript on the WP platform, I can’t see referrers in SM, but I can in the WP stats. I generally find SM more accurate in recording the number of visits and page views, but my thinking is we are not comparing apples with apples so the it isn’t the same basis of comparison. I use them in combination – but for entirely different things.
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Sitemeter will not record a page view if the visitor has been to any other page containing sitemeter code unless the page is refreshed. Sometimes even then it will not record the page view.
You can test this by visiting a page which has sitemeter on it, then visiting a page of a completely different site which has sitemeter and open stats.
Go to the second site’s sitemeter stats and look for your visit in the reports. IT will not be there. Then go back and hit Ctrl Refresh (or equivalent) and review the stats again. You page will should then be recorded.
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Quotes — now that’s what I call an answer. I checked it out, and it’s so. I am now satisfied SiteMeter is undercounting hits. Thank you.
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ouroboros: I don’t actually know the difference between SM and our stats. Our stats are probably more liberal than SM in some places, more conservative in others. Anyway, there is no definitive method for counting/excluding page views.
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*chuckle* It sure is a good thing that we are blogging for the pleasure of it. Because it seems like calculating blog stats is more like art than it is like an exact sicence, eh? And that in turn means we will always hear the cries of both agony and ecstacy as bloggers pursue their passion with passion. ;) *chuckle*
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Unfortunately, I’m not too familiar with how WordPress tracks the stats but I’m thinking the main difference is that Site Meter’s tracking is image tag based and WordPress is based on the internal WordPress log files. Because of that, the WordPress stats will also include visits from search engine spiders, web crawlers and robots in their numbers. The Site Meter visit and page view numbers are just based on visitors that will load the Site Meter image tags and most search engine spiders and robots don’t load the image tags. So the totals in the Site Meter stats will be lower because it won’t include the “visits” from web spiders and robots.
And Quotes, if you are seeing that happening, something else is probably occuring. I’ve never seen interaction between different accounts causing counting problems. Normally there is a delay before a visit will showup in the stat reports of about 30 seconds. That is probably why you are not immediately seeing the visit showup in someone else’s open stats.
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Hi everybody,
Don’t forget to check your local time (or time set at sitemeter’s end) against’s WP. See, my WP stats start counting at 6pm everyday (and that’s because my local time is different from the UTC) while my Sitemeter stats start counting at 12am everyday.
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