How statistics work.

One of the most often asked question, (mental note to self to actually write a FAQ page!), is how the stats are calculated.

Any visitor of JournalHome can visit 3 areas of the site.

1-     The journal home pages, those are pages that are accessible to all the visitors, for example the homepage or the statistic page, those are ‘journalhome pages’

2-     They can visit a weblog, for example this weblog address is http://www.journalhome.com/journalhome

3-     Finally a user can view an individual entry within the weblog.

When a visitor enters the website we record their IP address. That address is what tell any web server were to send the pages you see on your screen to.

Using the IP address we check if that user is unique to that area, (see number 1, 2 or 3 above). If they are not unique we add +1 to the number of unique visitors that day. If they are not unique we add +1 to page view, (‘cause page views are the total number of time of page was actually requested, regardless if it is from the same person).

So if a user visits one of my entries for the first time today

http://www.journalhome.com/JournalHome/36265/

-         We will add +1 visit for that entry, (#3 above)

-         We will add +1 for the weblog, (#2 above)

-         And we will add +1 for journalhome, (#1 above)

If that same user now wishes to visit another entry on my site

http://www.journalhome.com/JournalHome/36072/

-         We will add +1 visit for that entry, (as it is the first time they visit that page)

-         We will not add +1 for the weblog as we already counted them

-         We will not add +1 for the website as we already counted them

If that same user now loved my first entry and wishes to view it again

http://www.journalhome.com/JournalHome/36265/

-         We will not add +1 for that entry as we counted it already.

-         We will not add +1 for the weblog as we already counted them

-         We will not add +1 for the website as we already counted them

So, on your stats page you will see one unique visitor for the day.

JournalHome does not use cookies to track the stats as they can be disabled/ erased and so on. But using the IP address is also a problem as certain visitors have addresses that change all the time, (certain AOL users).

But as a whole the stats are close to the real value.

Another drawback is that we count robots as visitors, (but we still only count them once!), the logic been that you probably only have, (in a busy site), 20 or 30 robots visiting every single day.

On any given day JournalHome has about 50000 visits by the top 3 robots, (Yahoo, Google and MSN), but we still only count them as 3 separate visits.

If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will edit this post to answer them.

If you feel that your own stats are more accurate please let me know where they are from and I will check how they do things. Maybe I will learn a trick or two myself.

FFMG