WordPress.com

1. dmo42
   Member
   Aug 3, 2008, 11:20 AM

   I have been playing sround with a number of different stat counters & have found that they all have their problems/limitations due to the platform we all use - WordPress.com.

   I am interested to know what others think about statcounters on their blogs & do you think they are a reliable way of tracking ALL visits etc.

   Statcounter, that I currently use, showed this morning that I had 1 visitor while wordpress stats showed I had 71 page views & 4 different referring links. Not an mirror image at all!

2. wpvstp
   Member
   Aug 3, 2008, 11:28 AM

   I put a lot more trust in WordPress' stats than any other stat counter. WordPress uses Google Analytics, which I had om my blog before moving to wordpress.com. I found Google Analytics to be very accurate, so I'm putting my trust in WordPress stats now.

3. tellyworth
   Staff
   Aug 3, 2008, 11:48 AM

   dmosbon: no stats counter is perfectly accurate, mainly because of the difficulty in distinguishing between a real human who is actually reading your blog, and the myriad of weird and unexplained scripts, bots, spiders and other critters that request web pages.

   One of the likely explanations for a discrepancy between WP stats and another stats counter is in their respective definitions of "today" -- WordPress.com always considers today to mean "since midnight GMT", other stats counters may use different time zones.

   wpvstp, sorry to burst your bubble but WordPress blog stats doesn't use Google Analytics. WordPress.com staff do use Analytics to collect certain aggregate site-wide stats, but that's entirely separate from the stats we record and display for individual blogs. (And yes, we do use WP stats for monitoring traffic on the WordPress.com blog, faq.wordpress.com and so on).

   The basic technique used by WordPress.com stats is the same as Analytics (javascript inclusion, generally regarded as the most accurate technique for measuring real browser traffic). Other stats counters sometimes use different techniques that may be less accurate.

4. wpvstp
   Member
   Aug 3, 2008, 11:53 AM

   Well, you burst my bubble indeed, but not my trust in WordPress. As to GMT I've already noticed that i still kept counting way past midnight :-) in the same way that this forum runs on GMT.

5. mark
   Staff
   Aug 3, 2008, 12:41 PM

   On a non-wordpress.com blog I had I used 3 different statcounters (Analytics, Shinystat, Statcounter) at one point just to see what the numbers were. They were all different. Each site says their code was the best, most accurate etc but the difference still existed. And it's the same here.

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