page impressions
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- jacklalane
We have a web banner advertising our company on another site, and I set up a bit.ly url to track clicks (yes kinda a hack way). The host site says the click throughs are MUCH higher than my bit.ly report.
They sent a joomla screenshot that has a banner section with the said number of clicks. But I still feel I trust the bit.ly number more than theirs.Any possible reasons for the discrepancy?
thx
- foobaz0
I've wondered about this as well. On one of my personal projects I have a count data base column that gets incremented every time the page for that ID gets hit...
...that said my analytics program (reInvigorate) tells me that the count column numbers are much higher than relevant web visitors they count...
My only thought could be the impressions are from some kind of bot crawling the pages? I'm not sure.
I imagine the Joomla CMS page count/click to be something very similar to a simple database column auto incrementing and maybe not entirely accurate.
- fyoucher10
They like Gold's Gym better.
- blaw0
You would have been better off setting up a specific landing page for that advertisement, no? Then you could have tracked the traffic using your analytic software, which would hold more water than bit.ly.
- ukit0
Not sure what software your client is using but in general traffic stats will always vary greatly depending on the kind of filtering that is applied.
For instance, if I check the Urchin stats for one of my sites, it tells me I get about twice the number of daily visitors that Google Analytics says I do.
Reason for this is that Google is very conservative in the number of hits that it considers actual visitors and not bots. They go into more detail about this here: http://imulus.com/solutions/goog…
Whether this applies I guess would depend on how bit.ly measures traffic and how your client's site does, but it could be a reason for the discrepancy.
- Great link, I find this topic super confusing!jacklalane
- BattleAxe0
from stat counter , I have the same issue with SC and Google
Why are the stats different to my server log analysis?
StatCounter.Com can produce far different results to standard log file analysis. This is not surprising as our system is designed to track browsers NOT server requests. This can result in a significantly lower count than standard log file analysis. But it offers a more realistic figure of the visitors to your website and far more detail and it is provided in real-time!
So how do they differ?
A big factor is the placement of the StatCounter tracking code. You can use StatCounter to only track the pages you want by simply placing it on the pages you want to track. Log file analysis will track all server requests by default.
If you have very large, slow loading pages it is recommended to place the tracking code closer to the top of the page instead of the bottom. Or a visitor may exit your page before the page finishes loading and the tracking script will never have been loaded.
Framed websites can cause a big problem for log file analysis resulting in an over-inflated count. When a visitor visits a singe page that could often be recorded as 3 visits - loading the main frame, a side frame and a footer. StatCounter does not have this problem.
Cached pages are another huge problem for log file analysis this time resulting in a very poor undercount of visitors. Often your own local ISP will keep a cache of many websites you visit regularly. This speeds up your use of the web - unfortunately no server request is made to your website when this happens. And your visit will go uncounted. This does not happen with StatCounter with the use of javascript and a random variable each time.
Web Proxies - many users, most noticeably AOL users access the web through a web proxy. Their ip address can change on each request to your website so log file analysis could not accurately count your unique visitors. StatCounter does both - we use a simple cookie and the user's ip address.
Robots - the requests made to your website by robots will be recorded in your log files but it will not be recorded by StatCounter.
Overall StatCounter provides a far more detailed, accurate count and tracking of behavior of the 'real' visitors to your website than standard log file analysis.