Lies, damn lies and statistics

This is a guest post from Kevin Tea.

An ancient and long dead British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, is credited with coining the phrase "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" and since I have been running my online magazine I sure know what the man was talking about.

Everyone who starts an online resource- hereafter called a blog because I guess that's the term most people are familiar with - immediately starts to get into the stats thing, it becomes an obsession that gnaws at your brain like some demonic rabid rat that chomps its way through your grey matter, severing synapses until you become a wide eyed drooling idiot sitting in front of your Google Analytics page slavering because you got another 20 visitors to your site overnight. I plead guilty. I was that person. Hell, I almost started watching daytime TV. Then I saw the light.

Let me explain.

Like any new blogger I looked at what I needed to monitor visitors to my site and most people seemed to think that Google Analytics shone out of various parts of the body so I filled in all the details of my blog and then cut and pasted the script into where I thought it should go. Let's make an admission here, I write about technology but I am not that techy; I can drive a car but I cannot carry out a service or fix the camshaft if it curled up its little toes and died. I knew something was wrong when I checked the stats and Google Analytics showed that I had less people visiting my site than had left comments!

The company that hosts my blog offered two stats services, one called Webalyzer and the other AWStats. I knew of Webalyzer as the developer who developed our web site at work swore by it and I was impressed, well superficially. Over the months there were serious differences between the reporting systems. Webalyzer was feeding back roughly twice the number of visits than AWStats. At first it didn't matter greatly as the number of visits was fairly small but after six months or so when Webalyzer reported around 10,000 visits a month and AWStats showed around 5000, I started to get really puzzled.

Now I guess I could have raided my life savings and subscribed to one or more of the many SEO type services that litter the blogosphere demanding fees that resemble the national debt of Greece (and the UK come to think of it!) but I have a perverse and bloody minded streak and wanted to sort this one out myself.

As an old hippy with more than a little faith in the power of serendipity help came in a timely manner through Erica Mueller who pointed me to a Wordpress plugin called StatPress which I duly installed and started to watch and compare with my other two stats programs. Over a month or so I noticed that the StatPress and AWStats figures were pretty similar, not exactly the same but then I didn't expect a mirror situation.

Now here was the dilemma. Here I had two stats services giving comparable figures that were approximately half of what Webalyzer said I was getting. What was I to do? Well like any red-blooded blogger I decided to go for the stats that gave me the highest number of visits ... actually, I didn't! Despite the fact that AWStats and StatPress gave me lower figures it seemed natural to me to accept that these two systems supported and backed each other up. And in my heart I found it difficult to believe that a six month old blog was getting 10,000 visits a month so it was with a clear conscience that I removed Webalyzer from the system.

I may not be able to brag about a highly dubious number of visits and visitors, but being true to myself was of more important and this whole episode has given me the desire to continue to build my site and achieve that magical 10,000 visits a month, but it will be done with integrity and honesty and I'm happy with that.

What do you use to measure your stats?

Kevin Tea blogs about web 2.0 and cloud computing, with a slant towards small and medium sized businesses at Web2andmore.net

Also have a look at at:

1/ The traffic plateau and the one dimensional blog

2/ Billy Blogger and his 2010 objectives

3/ How to analyze the posts on your blog