No accounting for counts
In the midst of this week’s FMJRA, which incidentally does not include this item, Smitty comes up with an idea for a technical improvement:
I need to write a cron job to go through Sitemeter and scrape this sort of hilarity more often.
Devoted as I am to SiteMeter — I actually pay for their numbers, which I suspect is a rarity in blogdom — I submit that better details are going to make no difference if you’re not getting all the numbers in the first place.
Which, I believe, we’re not. WordTwit, a WordPress plugin that automatically sends a tweet every time a new post is made, counts pretty consistently 20 to 30 clicks on each new post from this site; SiteMeter invariably shows one or two arrivals from twitter.com. This means, of course, that folks are arriving from sources other than twitter.com — but SiteMeter isn’t always recognizing them. (Unfamiliar user-agent?)
And then there’s the ongoing feed issue. Since the first of the month, I’ve had a shade under 7,000 visitors, as counted by the Meter; however, this site has served up 10,700 copies of the feed. Not all XML transactions represent actual readers, of course, but clearly some people are reading this stuff and not being counted. I experimented briefly with embedding the actual SiteMeter count code in the feed, but this didn’t seem to work very well. (Perhaps Jscript and XML don’t play well together.)
Finally: does anyone comprehend Technorati anymore? I don’t.
smitty »
12 December 2009 · 1:08 pm
It’s a very detail-oriented sort of problem. If you really want the hard details, you have to run your own server and parse your own logs.
Not something for which I’ve the stomach.
Jeffro »
12 December 2009 · 2:36 pm
Technorati hasn’t let me claim my blog for a couple of years now.
You are right – Sitemeter does miss some hits. There are always discrepancies between my Feedjit list and SM. I have low enough traffic that this sort of thing is easily found.
Cary »
12 December 2009 · 3:19 pm
Anymore?