Sunday, December 26, 2004

Web Counters

I have for some time been thinking that the web counter I use on my web sites Site Meter was not accurate.
This turns out to be true, though I think that it really can't be expected to be accurate becuase of the way site counters work.

I am not 100% certain of this but I think that the Site meter (for which I have some Java Script embedded on each page) sends data about the browser for each visitor back to their databases. From there they generate the stats including the number shown on the site.
I started this site with a base value of 10,000 which was the number of hits I received on the old site before transferring it to spyjournal.biz (though I note it is now up to 11,826).

However the reason for my thinking this wasn't accurate was by looking at the Webalizer stats on my server. These represent actual traffic in and out of the server and I was able to ascertain that my actual traffic was around 4,000 per month not 1,100 or so as indicated by the Site Meter. Even this won't be accurate for reasons I will explain shortly. My total traffic includes RSS readers, spiders and search bots.

Traffic analysis will never be truly accurate because of the way the web works. Files are cached in local machines, local ISPs servers, and local domain servers. Thus it is possible that two users in the same area who connect fairly close together will register only one hit as the first person downloads files to the cache. The second person's browser will connect to the company server, shared ISP or local domain server that is common to both users and locate the required files in the cache there. Thus no second request for the pages will ever hit my server.


Posted by: Jethro | 10:05 AM |