{"id":738,"date":"2008-07-22T13:54:46","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T12:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/738-web-stats-do-you-believe-google-or-the-web-site-owner.html"},"modified":"2008-07-22T13:54:46","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T12:54:46","slug":"web-stats-do-you-believe-google-or-the-web-site-owner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/738-web-stats-do-you-believe-google-or-the-web-site-owner.html","title":{"rendered":"Web stats: do you believe Google, or the web site owner?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Escherman\u2019s Andrew Smith, in technology PR, asks <a href=\"http:\/\/escherman.wordpress.com\/2008\/07\/22\/it-pro-versus-google-whose-site-traffic-figures-do-you-trust\/\">whose site traffic figures do you trust<\/a> \u2013 Google\u2019s (via Ad Planner), or the site owner?<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t have Ad Planner, but because I run <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/adsense\">AdSense<\/a> I can see Google\u2019s stats on Adsense views on this site. I also have web logs, analyzed via <a href=\"http:\/\/awstats.sourceforge.net\/\">awstats<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I took a look at my own figures for June. My stats show about 6.5 times more page views than AdSense reports.<\/p>\n<p>This isn\u2019t hits vs pages, incidentally. \u201cHits\u201d record every request, so a page with several images requires several hits. Hits is therefore always the biggest number, but pages is in theory more meaningful.<\/p>\n<p>It is a huge discrepancy. What\u2019s the reason? I can think of several:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Google only counts page views that run its AdSense script. Bots like web crawlers are not likely to run these.<\/li>\n<li>Not all my pages have AdSense on them, though most do.<\/li>\n<li>Every time a request is made for my RSS feed, awstats will count that as a page view, but Google (rightly) will not.<\/li>\n<li>Google will try to eliminate the rubbish, like spam bots posting comments that end up in the <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/extend\/plugins\/akismet\/\">Akismet<\/a> junk box.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Still, 6.5 times is a huge difference, more than I would expect. The page view discrepancy on the site Smith chose to look at is a mere 4.2 times \u2013 though we don\u2019t know how that particular web site calculates its figures.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t have any firm conclusions, though my own figures suggest that any web site which simply quotes figures from its logs will come up with something much larger than Google\u2019s filtered stats.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d have thought the answer for advertisers would be to use tracking images and the like in ads so they can get their own statistics.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, this prompts another question. Just how much Web traffic is bot-driven? We know that somewhere between 65% up to, by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.circleid.com\/posts\/90_to_95_percent_spam_2007\/\">some estimates<\/a>, 90%+ of email is spam. Web crawlers and RSS feeds are not bad things, but they are not human visitors either. Add that to the spam bots, and what proportion does it form?<\/p>\n<div class=\"wlWriterSmartContent\" id=\"scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:116ef503-d46e-427c-b14e-317f0c4fe63b\" style=\"padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; float: none; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px\">Technorati tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/web+stats\" rel=\"tag\">web stats<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/google\" rel=\"tag\">google<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/adsense\" rel=\"tag\">adsense<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/bots\" rel=\"tag\">bots<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Escherman\u2019s Andrew Smith, in technology PR, asks whose site traffic figures do you trust \u2013 Google\u2019s (via Ad Planner), or the site owner? I don\u2019t have Ad Planner, but because I run AdSense I can see Google\u2019s stats on Adsense views on this site. I also have web logs, analyzed via awstats. I took a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/738-web-stats-do-you-believe-google-or-the-web-site-owner.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Web stats: do you believe Google, or the web site owner?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google","category-search"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}