Comments on: Are Your Web Stats Inflated?

By: coop

coop — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:58:20 +0000

im implementing this now… i am guessing that mine are very inflated

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 04:14:06 +0000

That’s a good tip Nate. I always new that I inflated the numbers somewhat but I didn’t know that Analytics had a predefined filter for it. I’ve now implemented across all my sites. Cheers.

By: TeamTutorials

TeamTutorials — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:56:20 +0000

My authors definitely inflate my ratings a little bit, but I am more concerned about unique IP’s per month.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 02:42:40 +0000

I recommend using GoStats as a better alternative. It's said to be easier to use than google-analytics. Most importantly you can also set GoStats to block your PC instead of only our IP. (Since IP addresses can change without notice)

By: fabiopedrosa

fabiopedrosa — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:27:42 +0000

This actually works fine for me…

I recommed people using dynamic ip address to subscrive a dynamic dns account… they usually are free and easy to use.

This way you can add your name address to google block filter, and google resolves it on real-time.

By: Armen

Armen — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:03:04 +0000

Good point Nate. I get a shock when I see some new bloggers noting their stats. Big visit figures with hardly any comments. Then it dawns on me…3/4 of the figures comes from the owner.

I’m a Statcounter user too. I prefer it’s speed and simplicity in comparison to GA.

By: mike

mike — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:04:17 +0000

I wish that I could get the equivalent of statcounter through google. Google (as far as I know) will store all of the data forever, which with statcounter, you get limited to 100 hits of data.

Also, Google Analytics has everything too scattered to be able to actually find something to make it useful. I also don’t like the 24-hour delay in reporting.

By: Jane

Jane — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:47:21 +0000

For the first few months, I really had a problem with Google Analytics because it would tell me that our visitors were well below 2 other stat sources we were using at the time. Now I mainly use Statcounter as my main source of stats. But GA has a variety of tools that I still use.

By: mike

mike — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:14:20 +0000

This is the one thing that I do with every monitoring service. I really don’t care how often I visit a page, just how often other people do.

As a webmaster of a site, it is easy to rack up large number of yourself, especially if you are making changes that require you to be consistently refreshing the page.

By: Scot Smith

Scot Smith — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:16:19 +0000

If you are on dial-up you may want to block the IP range from your ISP, as you’ve suggested.

You can do this by getting your ip, removing the numbers after the last decimal and replacing them with a *.

For example if my ip is 192.168.0.1 I would replace that with 192.168.0.* in my stats tracking program. This will also probably block visitors from people in your neighborhood or area, though.

– Scot

By: Nate Whitehill

Nate Whitehill — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 06:52:43 +0000

Hey Carl, thanks for the question. Actually, I believe a visitor can be logged more than once. For example, if you leave a site, and then go back to it several hours later, that counts as 2 visitors. To monitor the absolute unique visitors, under Analytics, on the left sidebar, go to Market Optimization, then Unique Visitor Tracking, then Absolute Unique Visitors. Those visitors are only counted once.

By: Carl Pei

Carl Pei — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 06:48:37 +0000

Are you sure the visitor count increases? Didn’t “visitor” mean unique hit in Analytics?