Reliable Stats?

[m00fbe00]

Hi all,

Just wondering what your thoughts were
regarding accuracy of stats packages that monitor traffic to your site. We currently use a package provided by our isp that uses
our logs to provide its info - its called
live stats/statistics server.

The reason for asking is that I found these
forums a couple of months ago and after
a year in the dark I started to learn what
was needed to get higher traffic. The
results are my traffic is increasing week
on week and whilst not massive to you
guys i'm well pleased ;-) btw thanks to
Laisha etc for all the help.

Anyway this week checking my logs I got
these results which look strange to me.

SESSIONS
SUN 539
MON 395
TUE 388
WED 1053
THU 3297
FRI 324

Any ideas as to why there should be such
a big jump on Wed/Thu? You see checking
the number of Sessions by referer I get the
figure of 4206 whilst total Sessions is supposedly 5986. Should I trust these figures
or should they be taken with a pinch of salt?

Big apologies for the length of this posting - sometimes a few sentances just
don't do it ;-)

Thanks in advance for any help.

Steve.

[rencke]

LiveStats is a top of the line product and considered very reliable. But the log itself may not be. Have you ruled out any natural explanation for this and have you checked if those additional requests were for a specific page?

Same thing happened to me during the last three days of January. According the stats one single page out of 1300, way down in the site, had received 143.000 requests during 48 hours. That page happened to have its own counter, which didn't show any unexpected activity. My ISP is looking into it and I am hoping to hear from them.

[engine]

Steve, it is often difficult to pin down a reason for a sudden change without studying the site logs in great detail. Take a look at the referrer details to help identify where the referals came from.
It could be a good position in a search engine that was originally several pages down.
It could be a subject of popular interest - for example, in the UK, many people are choosing their summer holidays right now, this means a site involved in holidays may see an increase in traffic.
It could also be a news story that is particulary relevant to a currently popular subject.

I've not known logs generate additional figures, but I have known them miss referrals. The raw logs do tend to be accurate.

[m00fbe00]

many thanks for the replies - I'll have
a look as suggested and see what I can
turn up. Thanks again.

cheers

Steve