World’s worst blog: Reality testing
June 2nd, 2008Since I have temporarily claimed the title of the world’s worst blog I thought I ought to do some reality testing. So here are the statistics available to me.
Technorati publishes a sort of Championship League of the world’s bloggers. Today they are ranking me at 334,267 in the World League. Which surprised me because the last time I looked at it, The Daily Novel was about 470,000, and in May I did fewer blogs than usual because of technical problems. (For comparison in my first few weeks of blogging my rank was about 1.9 million.)
The SlimStat figures from WordPress tell me that yesterday I had 2,278 hits and 221 visits. The figures provided by my hosting service, www.1and1.co.uk report that I had 1,367 page views and 732 visits yesterday.
I have found this huge discrepancy between WordPress and 1and1 when I have checked the figures in the past, and decided that I should not waste my time on damn statistics.
This morning I was more persistent and looked at the monthly figures for the last twelve months. I found that 1and1 consistently shows me with four or five times as many visits per month as does WordPress. But that, with the exception of one month, the figures for WordPress hits are almost the same as the figures for 1and1 page impressions. In May I scored 60,000 hits with WordPress and 57,000 page views on 1and1. Last June both 1and1 and WordPress scored me at 30,000 hits.
This helped to ease my depression because it means both companies think I have twice as many readers as a year ago. And it compares with my 1and1 scores of 4,000 for the first month of my blog in August 2006 and 22,000 in January 2007. Still very bad compared with the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, but at least the gradient is upward.
As for the huge gap in the figures for visits I wonder if it is something to do with the way the two companies deal with spam. The WordPress spam filter, Akismet, tells me that it has stopped 65,000 spam comments.
Anyone out there who knows whether this conjecture has truth?
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
The apparent difference in stats figure is almost certainly due to the different use of terminology.
To explain, hits and page views are two different things. Page view stats should reflect the number of times visitors have viewed the pages on your site.
Hits should show the number of requests to the server the visitor has made; this requires a bit more explanation. If your html page has 9 graphics then 9 requests (hits) for those graphics to load in the visitors browser are made plus one more for the html page itself making a total of 10 requests/hits.
In this situation there has been 1 page view, but 10 hits.
Now, if your stats provider isn’t using the correct terminology this is going to confuse anyone not familiar with the distinction.
Also, bear in mind that if for any reason not all of the graphics are delivered to the visitor’s browser say because they click away from the page before it’s fully loaded then not all potential hits will be recorded in your stats. So in my example you wouldn’t always get 10 hits for evry page view.
Hope this helps.