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obsessive compulsive stats disorder

obessive compulsive stats disorder


I've come to the conclusion that Extreme Tracking is wholly unreliable. When I view the stats from my host in the morning, I see referrals from places that ET does not track. Metafilter, Blogdex, Daypop and certain blogs do not show up in my referrall stats from ET. If I did not view my host stats, I would have never known that the Montgomery County Democrats Club of Texas supports the Banned Books Project. So basically, the stats that I have been viewing on ET are most likely wrong and under reported. The problem is, I don't know how to decipher Dreamhost's stats. It's not as clear cut as ET in that I can't tell just by looking how many hits or referrals I had yesterday. Oh please, don't look at me like that, it's not as if you don't view your stats daily either. I would just like to know, for my own personal gratification reasons, what I really average per day.

So if anyone can interpet the graphic above (click to biggie-size it) to determine just what my stats are, I would appreciate it.

Posted by on September 16, 2002 07:21 AM |

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Comments

Wow, you get as many page requests in a day as I do in a month at the moment. I don't check every day, but I just 'lurve' going through the request report and seeing the bizzaro things people type into search engines to find me. I don't think I'll ever top 'i ran out of milk so piss in my cereal lol'. I'm serious.

Posted by: Jessica Parker | September 16, 2002 07:46 AM

Oh, you want the stats interpreted. Sorry. My ISP uses the same program. Those stats look like they were reset and are only for a day. Successful requests are all requests, images etc. You need to read the successful requests for pages. I'm just surprised to see the numbers so out of whack. You look like you're getting around 4,400 page hits per day.

Posted by: Jessica Parker | September 16, 2002 07:48 AM

I'm on Dreamhost, too. I just head straight for the Referrer Report. Unfortunately, there is always a category at the bottom called [not listed: x URLs]. I always wonder who those were, but I'm usually too lazy to telnet in and pick up the actual log file in the stats directory.

Anyway, it is kinda fascinating (in a geeky sort of way) to look at the summary report and try to figure out traffic. For example, my "Successful requests for pages" and "Data transferred" are almost the same as yours. However, your "Successful requests" and "Distinct hosts served" are about 3 times as high! Very strange...what does that mean? Are people looking at the same page over and over again on your site or mine?

Posted by: Solonor | September 16, 2002 08:27 AM

I'm on Dreamhost as well, but I don't even bother to look at their reports. I don't know if it's sloth or my total lack ot tech savvy, but I use Sitemeter, and I've been (generally) pretty happy with the information I get. I mean, can we ever really know with any degree of accuracy how many hits/unique visitors/three-toed sloths visit our sites on a given day?? Doubtful....

Posted by: Jack Cluth | September 16, 2002 08:35 AM

A 'Successful request' can be attributed to any file, since a browser must request everything on a page, ie images are also 'requests'.

'Successful requests for pages' would include people who are hitting reload (including you) and anyone coming back time and again (including me).

In other words, if I sit and hit reload three hundred times, you will see 300 'successful requests for pages' and about 5100 'successful requests', because of all the images. But, you only had one visitor (who was obsessive compulsive).

'Unique visitors' is a grossly disappointing, but generally more reliable indication of traffic. Although a person will usually only be counted once in an hour (or within a time frame, ie a stats program might be setup to ignore returns if they are within 30 minutes), and a person can be counted more than once if their IP changes, it is still more accurate than page requests.

'Distinct hosts served' makes no sense to me, since requests come from clients, not hosts. If by hosts it means my ISP, Sympatico, than it should only count Sympatico as one distinct host. If it means my PC (using the long series of info tacked on to the front of my ISP's domain), than it might be a little more accurate, though like I said, it's a client and not a host.

I use Sitemeter, which doesn't seem to be too bad, though the best by far is Fluid Dynamic's (free) script, AXS Tracking from XAV.COM. You host it, and configure it, and as long as you're not using an old Netscape server you will find the stats far more useful and configurable.

'Data transfer' is useless. If you have a single MP3 on your site at 5 megs, you already have 50 megs in bandwidth if only ten people download it. Seven days of that, and you have a 350 meg month and only 70 visitors.

I run a chat server, and on a day when only 5 people use it for a few hours, my bandwidth spikes (as does my 'page requests') because of the refreshing.

Webalizer is also very good.

I don't even remember what you asked. Wow, am I longwinded.

Posted by: Mike | September 16, 2002 10:07 AM

And I thought Joy was the only person that checked stats everyday to see exactly how many hits we got, and where they came from.

Posted by: Robert | September 16, 2002 10:23 AM

These look like stats generated by Analog. It's freeware--you can actually download it and run it locally if you really want to geek out. You'll have to download your raw stats, too, though, and do lots and lots of jigging with the slightly cryptic configuration file to make it do what you want.

"Distinct hosts served" for Analog is actually what you'd think of as "distinct (client) IP addresses served" which should give you a rough idea of how many different people are looking at your site, but even that is a bit blurry--there isn't a 1:1 relationship between viewers and IP addresses.

Posted by: Pete | September 16, 2002 04:36 PM

What Mike said.

:: running to get AXS Visitor System. Thanks, Mike! :) ::

Posted by: roe | September 16, 2002 04:55 PM

The stats say that you are a popular person and people really like you. They really do.:)

Posted by: wKen | September 17, 2002 02:54 PM

Here's a description of the reports from Analog (the program that generated your report). http://www.analog.cx/docs/reports.html

Posted by: Lisa | September 17, 2002 08:23 PM