Site Traffic

Hi - I'm wondering why the site traffic on my website differs from the visitor tracking on Clicky. My website notes 14 visits on Feb 28, but Clicky only registered 6 visits? Can you tell me what happened?

You are probably comparing against a "log analyzer" which will include a lot of robot activity. If you want to compare the accuracy of Clicky, you need to do it against another hosted service, such as Statcounter.com.

I can understand that there may be some traffic on my website, such as robot activity, but again, yesterday, March 2nd you report no visitors, yet my site reports 12 hits - you should at least be receiving an initial visit report since obviously someone did go to my website, can you explain why these are not being registered when my site shows that someone actually visited my website?

I went to your site to verify the code is installed correctly, and on every page, and that appears to be the case. (I block myself from being tracked with Clicky so you won't see my visit).

We have hundreds of thousands of sites using Clicky and I know that almost all of them would vouch for the accuracy of our service.

The problem here is you are comparing against a log analyzer. It doesn't matter how many visitors you think you may or may not have had when the only thing you compare against is a log analyzer.

If you want to check the accuracy of our service, what you need to do is install another *hosted* service, such as Statcounter.com, and see how Clicky compares to that. Once you do that, I thikn you will see that the numbers we report will be almost exactly the same. You simply cannot rely on a log analyzer to give you any kind of accurate data on "real" visitors.

Thank you for looking into this for me. I'm not sure I understand the difference between a log analyzer and what you use to register visits. (I'm only computer literate enough to be dangerous lol). If someone actually goes to my website, wouldn't Clicky register that?

Yes if a real person actually goes to your site, we should register it. There are some reasons why we may not (as covered in our FAQ) but we should be capturing most of them.

A "log" is generated by a web server whenever any request comes in for a page on your site, whether it's a robot or not. So, it's 100% accurate as to all the hits your sites gets - but it can't differentiate between robots and humans. Some of them try to but there's no way they can do it with 100% certainty.

On the other hand, hosted services rely on your visitor's web browser executing the extra code you paste onto your site for a service like Clicky. Most robots do not execute this kind of code, and even those that do, we try to filter out. So, what you see in Clicky should be 99% or more humans. But what you see in a log analyzer, depending on how popular your site is, could easily be 100% robots on one day and 100% humans on the next. there's no way to know so the only way to really check our accuracy is to compare against another service that works similar to ours (such as Statcounter).

OK! Thanks for the info. I may put Statcounter on my website as well, just to see what my website server is doing. I'm registering a lot of hits with them (for my small site) - 88 or 89 in the last week, which is quite a difference from what Clicky is reporting. Wish I could tell the difference. I had someone email me last night, who said they were going to check some info on my site, but Clicky is not registering her visit..not sure what's up with that.

Is your site available on multiple domains maybe? e.g. site1.com and site2.com? If so you would have to enter in all of the extra domains in your "mirrors" setting in site preferences. We validate traffic against the domains you have registered so anything not in there we would ignore.

ladynred10,

some webpages will receive 20 times the number of hits that actual human beings make. Just as a case in point, whenever I post a web page on twitter, it automatically gets 25 visits. But not one actual visitor.

Hi, Are you sure you aren't comparing "hits" to "visitors" 2 quite different seo animals.
Lynny @ seobycanz.com
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