Maintaining this site has been both therapeutical and educational. Today I’ve had the responsibility of tackling the statistics, and making sense of it all. In order to track the statistics, I use MyBlogLog, WordPress Stats, Google Analytics, Dreamhost and Feedburner because either they’re a free service or in the case of Dreamhost it’s bundled in my purchased host package. Most importantly I use so many different sites as a comparative analysis to see which is more accurate, especially since I really don’t know what I’m reading.
MyBlog Log
I don’t pay for this service, and so the free service doesn’t archive my data for the month of January. At the time that I’m writing this, it’s unavailable. But, as I recall, the stats from MyBlogLog were exactly the same as WordPress Stats.
WordPress Stats
- 1,220 visits
- Top 5 Posts
- Bred, Born and Raised in Hawai’i
- Let’s Network!
- Dreamhost Billed Me Too
- Sprout Builder
- Purging Social Networks
- Twitter referred the most readers during the month of January.
I filtered out both my own and Lilinoe’s visits, and though extremely modest numbers I am quite grateful since I’ve only shared my site with a few friends and a handful of family members. I figured it would be a better story to tell if they either somehow surfed on in or were referred by someone else.
Google Analytics
I sat in an hour discussion at Unconferenz on this topic, so I was well aware that the data is difficult to decipher and completely different from other tracking sites, even though the values and settings are all the same.
- 655 visitors
- 372 absolute unique visitors
- 1,556 page views
- 43.21% return visitors
- Top 3 Referring sites
Even though MyBlogLog and WordPress Stats match exactly, I am more inclined to believe Google Analytic’s data. One thing to point out, the definitions of each statistics varies by site as well. And so, the number of page views from Google Analytics may actually correspond with what WordPress calls visits.
Dreamhost
For starters, I needed the assistance of support to obtain my user name and password, and when I looked at the data it was obvious that there were some kind of set values tweaking the information. For example, according to Dreamhost, there were 37,505 successful requests for accessing any file on the site. Dreamhost does provide the individual computers DNS addresses, and even if I subtracted my own laptop, it still would only reduce the “successful requests” number a few thousand. And, if you’re wondering, except for the daily posts I am hardly on my own site.
In summary, those are my statistics according to the various sites and I’m humbled and honored for each and every reader interested in knowing what’s spewing From the Mind of NEENZ. But, I need to invest more time in studying the data given to me, in hopes of improving the quality of my sight. I feel a complete overhaul in appearance coming on!
