How Accurate are Statistics?
Fri, 30 November, 2007 – 7:25 pm
We're all obsessed with statistics these days. What's your Alexa Rank, what's your Google PageRank, how many visitors do you get a day, how many feed subscribers do you have? When I first started building websites I would be lucky to get a visitor to my site who I didn't actually know. Those were the days of the free half a megabyte hosting from Tripod! (Circa 1996).
Statistics are used for all types of marketing. Advertising premiums are usually determined by the website's statistics, the recent spurt of blog sales, again the success of the site and subsequent price is measured on the statistics. Sure, we do need to have something to make our assumptions on, but just how accurate are those figures?
So let's take this domain (2 blogs plus a front end combination of the 2 - and no it's not for sale!) and see how the various stats offerings vary.
- Alexa Rank
- Is currently 76,201. Remember Alexa Rank is combination of your visitors and page views, but it's also a measurement of only those who have the toolbar installed. I have a client site that gets over 60 times the visitors to here and their Alexa Rank is around 140,000.
- Compete
- Apparently in the month of October this site had 4,299 visitors which averages at 143 a day. This is only an estimation of US traffic so I assume (although I could be wrong as I don't pay much attention to Compete) that this wouldn't include any other country's traffic.
- AWStats
- AWStats reports 5,727 visitors for October, just under 185 per day.
- W3 Counter
- This reports 2,794 visitors for October, which works out to 90 visitors per day.
So which do you believe? Personally, I believe W3 Counter is the most accurate as it seems to clarify what Feedburner and WordPress.com Stats tell me. How Compete determines its figures is beyond me, and clearly server logs are most likely over inflated by the increasing amount of spam bots and spiders we have on the loose these days.
Of course, all statistics can be gamed, but the above figures are accurate reports from each source, no gaming involved.
So next time you look at your stats just ask yourself, are they as accurate as you think?
4 Responses to “How Accurate are Statistics?”
I really like w3counter myself. I use it and Google Analytics, but to be honest, since I signed up for w3counter, I've never even looked at Analytics except to check in on how many downloads my icon set has.nnThe only thing that gets me about w3counter is that the filter to not track my own visits doesn't seem to work for me. I've talked with Dan about it and nothing that I do seems to work, but I don't visit my site much so the numbers shouldn't be to far off.
By Deron Sizemore on Dec 3, 2007
I like w3 counter too, except it's so slow to load for me. However as I'm only on the free service I can't complain!
By Sarah on Dec 3, 2007
I watch my hits in Mint and Awstats. Let me just say that Awstats flatters my ego somewhat
By Jem on Dec 3, 2007
It makes you wonder if it's just blogs that are spam magnets or how inflated all sites are with their stats.
By Sarah on Dec 5, 2007