Webalizer - Sitemeter - Weblog Expert

Which one do I beleive?

[shawn]

I have noticed that the webalizer numbers have not been anything close to what Sitemeter has been showing me each month. So I downloaded WebLog to see what it had to say. Needless to say I am really not sure which one is more accurate (well I know which figures I would like to be true!)

My feeling is that sitemeter may be the most accurate.

Stats for August

Webalizer
Total Visitors 1636 - Average 60 per day

Weblog Expert -
Total visitors 2,564 - Average 91 per day

Sitemeter.com
Total visitors 594 - average of 22 per day

Shawn

[chiyo]

Difference could be accounted for by:

1.Does Sitemeter counts the hits to an image. This way it ignores all accesses that dont access images like robots, people with images turned off etc. These can easily account for a significant majority of "visits" for a small site.

2. Different ways they count a uniqiue visitor (say only once for any visit over the month, or once for every visit separated by 30 mins, 2 hours, 24 hours etc, or count it as one for every hit no matter the timing differences) These definitions can usually be changed in your default set up.

3. Maybe one is actually reporting "page views" or "hits" rather than unique visitors. Again, check the preferences or default set up for each system.

If you really want to find what is "most correct" compare against your raw log using excell or something like that, seeing your traffic is very low.

[shawn]

....... seeing your traffic is very low.

Man you know how to burdt a guys bubble :)

This is how site meter defines a "visit":

"Site Meter defines a visit as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views. If you click on a link to another site, and then come back to your site within 30 minutes, you are still on the same visit and Site Meter won't increment the counter. But Site Meter will increment the number of page views recorded for your current visit."

So every 30 minutes it is going up for the same visitor looks like.

WebLog actaully takes the data from my Raw server logs - I would think this would be very accurate, but it seems to a bit higher than the other 2?

When I import this log in to EXCEL, how do I filter it out to see how many unique IP's or visitors?

Sorry to be so "green" on this subject.

Shawn

[chiyo]

seeing your traffic is low...

Well quality is much more important than quantity, especially if you have a niche site with high-value visitors. I would be happy with that traffic for a site selling corporate jets as long as i was getting a couple of enquiries a day!

In excell, i just pay around with sorting via IP and times, you can actually get a better idea of traffic that way when you dont have too many. Just filter out gifs jpgs and scripts first, so you only have pageviews.

I would guess that weblog is counting all visits inlcluding robots who are not actually "viewing" the page.