I've been playing with some of the different programs to track stats on my blog lately to try to get a real idea how many visitors per day I get, which posts are most popular, etc. It becomes obvious very quickly that counting page views and traffic is not trivial:
- Using awstats, WordPress.com Stats, and Google Analytics, I get very different results. According to awstats, I have far more traffic than shown through WordPress.com or Google Analytics.
- My blog (or at least some of it) is aggregated to Planet SUSE, Linux.com, and maybe to individual feed readers by folks using things like Google Reader, etc. So the number of people reading is not the same thing as the number of people actually hitting the blog.
Curious to hear how others track their traffic, and thoughts on getting the most accurate numbers possible.
2 Comments
I think Mint (www.haveamint.com) is the best tool out there. It's $30 but so worth it. It will track your stats, referrers, time spent on size, aggregate popular posts and there are plugins (called peppers) that can handle rss subscribers, location, downloads, user agents, outgoing links and other info.
I find it is pretty even with Google Analytics, though not exact, but far more helpful. As for why Awstats shows more hits -- it's just dumping the logs, it doesn't differenciate between bots (search engine crawlers are a huge bot source, scrapers too, also XML for rss feeds) and real visits so you can't trust the raw figure.
I endorse w3counter. Please help me track world-wide marketshare. It is free as in gratis and it has a nice wordpress plugin. Here I explain why I chose w3counter: http://whatwillweuse.com/2009/07/22/how-will-we-count/