How many pageviews?

May 11, 2012 7:26 AM

I have a blogger/blogspot blog, and I get very different information about my stats from the "stats" page, Google Analytics, and statcounter.com. Who is right?

I know it can take a little while for the data to be updated, so here are the stats for May 8th:

Blogger's stats page: 512 pageviews
Google analytics: 187 visits, 292 pageviews
Statcounter: 264 unique visits, 375 pageviews

As you can see, this isn't an issue of being off by just a couple visits - 292 and 512 are pretty different!

I have my own visits blocked in Blogger and Statcounter, I don't see a way to block myself from Google Analytics (but it has the lowest numbers anyway).

posted by insectosaurus to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Google analytics and Statcounter rely on reporting from the viewer's browser via Javascript or some other in-page method -- some browsers disable this, adblocker may affect Google in particular, and 'spiders' (search engines reading your pages) ignore it as well, so you're only counting a subset of visitors whose browser responds when asked for tracking data. Blogger's own stats likely come from server data, which cannot be circumvented so easily. So, Blogger is probably more exact but counts non-human or incomplete hits, while Google and Statcounter likely count actual humans, but miss quite a few actual humans. The reality is somewhere in between.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:40 AM on May 11, 2012 [3 favorites]

Add ons like Ghostery are also becoming popular and that might create differences based on what AzraelBrown has already said.

Don't forget, Blogger's also got all those spam hit/urls coming from Ukraine and whatnot adding to the confusion.
posted by infini at 8:34 AM on May 11, 2012