Web Analytics: Managing Incongruous Site Statistics Without Going Crazy

The various web analytics applications, that monitor web site accesses, often show different  data leaving confused the site owner. Has often happened to me to run into frustrated users who do not know how to consider such kind of differences.

It happens frequently that programs such as Google Analytics or Lloogg produce statistics in defect respect to the ones produced by your server.

Photo Credit: AnaBGD

Fake visitors

The reason is very simple: the programs of web analytics that monitor the accesses reading the log files of the web server (as awstats for instance) erroneously evaluate like visits many contacts that are not. Here a list of false positive that can wreck the web stats:

XML engines

When you submit your feed into XML aggregators, a bot check your feed for updates frequently. Feedburner, for exaple, works this way: more your site is up to date, more it comes frequently producing a lot of access logs which could be confused with real visitors, but it are not.

Spiders

It's the same for search engines spiders that index your web pages. Some times it are so intrusive that can bring your server to crash.

Trackback spammers

This is one of the most common causes of false positive.  If your blog support trackback it is subject to be spammed. In fact spam bots continuously call the trackback script trying to insert some links. Some of these bot are able even to modify its referring IP every time they call the script, and could therefore be seen as various visitors.

Comments spam

It is the same for the comments; bot continuously try to insert fake comments with links inside calling the script and generating a new log each time. Each log line can be confused with a visitor.

Look at these stats: this web site has no more than 150 visits each day, but the log analytics seems to be more optimist: it are all trackback spam attempts.

How to get perfect web statistics

In few words, it is not possible to get an affordable idea about web traffic using just a log analytics application. It would be better to use an outside application, which makes use of JavaScript to track the visits on the content pages (I recommend LLOOGG, i have some invitations), and make comparison with the stats produced by your web server.

In this way attempts of spam on trackback or comments script will be ignored, and the visit counter will increase just when JavaScript will be executed on the content pages. In any case you will never have perfect stats, but you will be able to have a more reliable idea about the real traffic of your blog.