Accurately Tracking Your Blog Visitors
I learned something over the last few days that I want to share with my readers and that is there seems to be no 100% accurate way to track the unique visits and pageviews to your blog without directly accessing your web server logs. In using Su.Pr heavily on the latter part of last week I saw my blog visits were virtual flat, no increase, yet checking my stats on Su.Pr website showed I was getting dozens of clicks and in some cases over a hundred to a single blog post on one day. I checked my Counterize2 Stats and nothing, checked my Google Analytics stats and again, I can’t see any increase in visits and no referrals from su.pr or stumbleupon for those posts which supposedly received 100+ clicks on the Su.Pr links.
- I did more digging and noticed my RealRank was very good (170 average) but again wasn’t reflecting the amount of visits I was actually getting, Google searching and found the following out:
- Izearanks does not track Stumbles to your site or Su.Pr at all, maybe not even Ow.Ly or other URL shrinking referrals, this means that your RealRank is not an actual reflection of your unique visits it omits what could be a huge amount of alternative traffic to your site.
Google Analytics does not accurately track stumbleupon or even track Su.Pr referrals at all to your website or blog, it does track StumbleUpon stumbles (but not 100% accurately) and it does track Ow.Ly which is Hootsuite’s shrinking service. This means your Analytics are wrong for your blog and site if you are heavily using Su.Pr or StumbleUpon.
This makes me wonder how can we provide accurate unique visits and impressions numbers to would be advertisers if we can’t find a service to accurately track all of the visits to your site, I am pondering a solution to this problem. My blog may have as many as 200+ more unique visits per day from services that don’t even reflect on IzeaRanks or Google Analytics, this could be the difference of 5000 impressions per month or more.
Su.Pr definitely helps get your blog tons of traffic, but it doesn’t reflect anywhere which is concerning to me, I am hoping to find a way to solve the issue and have engaged StumbleUpon’s support site.
So remember if you are stressing over why your blog may not be getting as many unique visits as you would expect, and you are heavily using StumbleUpon or certain URL shrinking services this may be a cause and you should find an alternative web site tracking. If you know of any that are better than Analytics, for tracking visits & pageviews let me know. By the way, if you don’t know what StumbleUpon Su.Pr is then you should probably read my StumbleUpon Su.Pr post.
-Dragon Blogger
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There's always been problems with stat tracking. It's just gotten more confusing now that there are multiple URL shorteners and they tend to put up their own toolbar. I used to have this problem even before these things came out. It seems that every tracking service gave me a different number. In my opinion, the most accurate stat tracker is the number of RSS subscribers or Twitter followers because it means that you are engaging people.
.-= Tamahome Jenkins@Everything Is History´s last blog ..A Brief History of Call of Duty =-.
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