.com, .net, US problem

How do you separate countries?

[Susanne]

According to two stats programs nearly 60% of our visitors come from the US and we know for sure that isn't true. As far as we've been able to understand, all .coms and .nets are lumped together and listed under the US. How do you guys handle the stats for country of origin? Do you know of a good program that is able to differentiate between countries properly or is it the fault of the raw log files that we're not able to know for sure where our visitors come from? Do we have to configure our servers differently so that the logs come out with more specific data on countries? Thankful for any opinions, cheers!

[gutabo]

I don't know for sure, (I'm still a n00b in this biz) but last year when I asked the same thing, the answer was: you will never know for sure...
If you are using IP addresses, dynamic IPs are your worst nightmare. Unless you work for akamai/you steal their IP addresses database (very unlikely), you'll have to work with cookies and other gadgets... and even so, you'll still never be 100% sure...

Just my two cents... I know there are lots of peeps in here way more knowledgeable than me that will answer your question (and mine ;) ) better!

Hope you find a way out of that issue!

[Susanne]

We've now tried ALL the major stats programs and they ALL show the same faults... :( Is there anybody out there who has correct stats? Anybody like me who knows most of their traffic comes from outside the US AND who've managed to see that reflected in the stats. Please help... More than half of our stats are wrong and we receive around 20 000 unique per month.

[itrainu]

Hi Susanne!

I can't promise a solution to this but I will share my experience. I use Mach3 Analyzer (FastStats) and sometimes it shows traffic from Google.com vs. Google.ca or some of the other googles. The flakiness of it is not due to this software but due to Google I think.

One of the things that I liked about the different googles, though it is far from 100% reliable is that I live in Canada and if I go to Google.com I get rerouted to Google.ca. When I use the google toolbar however, this does not help.

I still like to see the trend of Google.ca vs. .com even if the info is not 100% accurate. Google stopped doing this for a month but appears to have started again...

itrainu

[Susanne]

itrainu,
Thanks. We tried FastStats but got the same result. I think our problem lies in the configuration of the stats programs. Of course one wants to exclude any robots from the countries stats because most of them come from the US and there are A LOT of them.