Comments on: Analytics Observations

By: Amanda Fern

Amanda Fern — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:59:25 +0000

I’m in charge of driving unique visitors to my site and there isn’t a more anticipated time of the month for me than checking the analytics account I have measuring my website’s traffic. It seems like you have some great blog posts that have caught on and become somewhat “viral”. Congrats. Once you break through the clutter once, it will become easier and easier to get another piece of content seen by an extended audience.

By: Wine of Month Club

Wine of Month Club — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:07:54 +0000

I wish I could get to 50% organic traffic…I guess good things come to people who wait. I am impressed though that you choose not to make any profit from the site, I would consider at least throwing up adsense or something….it doesn’t hurt anyone and you could buy a nice dinner a month with it at least.

By: Dougal

Dougal — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:43:30 +0000

The difference could be because WordPress Stats shows you “pageviews” by default, but Google Analytics shows you “visits” (unique visitors). So if the average visitor to your site views 3 pages during a session, that could account for the difference.

For example, my WordPress Stats for yesterday says I had 899 pageviews. But Google Analytics says 626 visits. However, if I go into Google Analytics, change my view to “compare two metrics”, I can compare “visits” to “pageviews”, and see that GA recorded 932 pageviews. Which is close enough to the 899 number in my book: roughly a 3% difference.

Of course, it is always possible that for some reason, one script or the other is not loading for all visitors, but I would expect that would only happen for a small percentage of visits.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:10:04 +0000

My personal home page and blog has roughly 100 visitors daily. That is at least what Automattic’s WordPress Stats tells me. When I compare that number to what Google Analytics indicates, then I’m in for a surprise: According to Google, I have only roughly 30 visitors a day. I am at a loss. The only explanation I can come up with is that the two systems count visitors differently. Although both systems, or the plugins I use for their purposes, claim that they don’t account for administrator visits. Only other visitors. Either Google Analytics or WordPress Stats, or maybe both, is lying to me.

The other thing I find astonishing is that the one post that is more than a year old about what my new apartment looks like (after I moved) has the most hits still today. From search engines. It seems I should change from being a computer professional to doing interior design…

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:42:23 +0000

My #1 article is still a guide for how to get the most recent World of Warcraft expansion to work on Linux It retains strong numbers from search engines despite having been out since early 2008.

I recently decided to hide all my analytics stuff. I still have it collecting data in the background, but I took the panels off my dashboard and stopped visiting Google Analytics. It was consuming too much of my attention and I disliked how worried I was becoming about generating higher numbers and fussing with SEO. I like that popularity boost too, but I don’t want to lose sight of my purpose: writing because I enjoy it.

That being said, I’ll definitely write a new Linux guide when the next WoW expansion comes out. No one else had one for a long time and chances are no one else will when the next game drops. The boost to numbers is undeniably nice ^_^