Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Blogger: Stats you can trust?

There is something distinctly odd about the usage stats provided by Blogger for this site. Page views surge and fall abruptly for no apparent reason.  A post about the New World Order is ranked by Blogger as the most popular one day, then a  much older post about the London riots suddenly emerges at the top of the list, and the former and more recently written top post drops overnight to near the bottom of the list, yet none of this surge in hits for the older post is due, apparently, to links from other Web sites. Rather, it would seem that the newly popular page is suddenly coming up in multiple Google searches, yet there seems no reason for a wave of new interest in the London riots. Very odd.

Another oddity is that whereas my Blogger usage stats might indicate, say, 500 page views on a particular day, if I run Google ads on my pages, Adsense will tell me that my page views are only about one tenth of that number.

Odder still, most page views are the result of links from Google, whereas there are virtually not links from Bing.com and non whatever from Yahoo.com or other search engines. So am I being favored by Google in some way, or are my blog posts invisible to most other search engines, or are my blog stats simply wrong?

Altogether, these anomalies induce a slight sense of paranoia. Perhaps there are simple explanations. If any one can suggest an explanation, I'd be glad to hear from them.

Naturally, I'd ask Google if I could, but Google is decidedly unapproachable should you wish to pose a simple question to an actual human being. I guess that would involve employing people, something the modern American corporation seems extremely reluctant to do.

4 comments:

  1. Hey man, having the same obscure experience. Seem to have got like 10k pageviews from the US alone in the last week, with practially non existent sharing/commenting through the blogger buttons.

    Have you gotten more informed about the cause and such?

    Feedback is really appriciated.

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  2. "Have you gotten more informed about the cause and such?"

    No, sorry, I never did find out what was going on. Eventually the weirdness just stopped.

    But perhaps someone else can explain improbable blogger stats.

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  3. Finding the same issue myself. From the beginning I started my own counters (one for individual computers and one for the number of times the page was looked at). There is no correlation between my numbers and the stats that Blogger relates to me. Although it is sometimes entertaining to discover on Blogger stats that 25 people looked at my blog on one day, if I press refresh I often get a different number.
    Blogger is free which is nice, but if their stats are arbitrary I would prefer nothing at all.

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  4. Im having the same problem, i checked my adsense like you said and it dosnt match up. Is it just blogger. The stats kind of got my hopes up.

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