June 12, 2005

SiteMeter is F*CKED!

Here's what my sitemeter said 5 minutes ago:


Yesterday it said this week's hits were 932.

Somebody's math isn't quite right..... And it ain't mine.

Posted by caltechgirl at June 12, 2005 10:33 PM
Comments

Click on the "Display Help" link at the bottom of the "General Summary" report and it'll explain how the "This Week" values are calculated. The "This week" value is calculated each day using the previous 7 days of statistics and doesn't start on any particular day of the week.

Posted by: David Smith at June 12, 2005 11:13 PM

Still doesn't add up, at least it doesn't look that way when I look at the monthly visits graph....

Posted by: caltechgirl at June 12, 2005 11:30 PM


ms caltechgirl,

my feb 11,2005 post in deep throat contest appears to have won. who do i see about "prize"?

kennnthomas

Posted by: ken thomas at June 13, 2005 08:06 AM

Site Meter has always been funky. Even when it's doing things exactly as it's supposed to by its own rules, it tends to appear funky.

What I usually notice is this:

Go and look at main screen and see you have had, say, 100 visitors. Look at referrers and see that the latest referrer is xyzblog that's rare enough it's an obvious demarcation.

Go a while later. Visitors is 102 even though 2 seems low for the amount of time passed. Look at referrers. There have been 25 new referrers since the one for xyzblog.

Not overstating it; it can be that far off and more. It seems to catch up now and then, but there seems to be a lag in recalculating and displaying correctly, and I discovered that if you took the meter and took the daily hits and tracked them day after day, it averages off, with the meter displaying fewer than Site Meter claims internally that you got.

I used to obsess. I stopped, but I still get irked by it. The consolation is that "everybody" uses Site Meter* and so we are all comparably miscounted.

* Not true, but enough true that it bugs the crap out of me when someone doesn't, though not as much as when someone does but it's passworded.

Posted by: Jay at June 13, 2005 09:54 AM