Accuracy of Cystats and WordPress.com Stats Plugins

Hi there, I agree, I find Cystats much more useful.
good luck.
mike.

+1 here too. Not necessary Cystats as an alternative. But wp.com stats doesn’t seems to be accurate at all :/

I’ve compared the following
* AwStats
* Cystats
* Google Analytics
* StatPress
* WassUp
* WordPress.com Stats

Only WordPress.com Stats stands out, and not in the positive way unfortunately. This only looking at the actual accuracy in statistics.

Thanks for the replies. I’m still trying to figure why the numbers are so different. Looking at my numbers from my Lijit search widget (not sure how it compares) and the Feedjit “recent visitors” map, they don’t look so high either.

Are the much higher numbers from Cystats reliable? Why are the others lower?

What bugs me most about the WordPress.com stats plugin is that it doesn’t appear to be able to work out which page people are viewing. I consistently get a very short list of pages viewed with very high hit counts, instead of a large number of pages viewed each with small hit counts (that google analytics and cystats show).

Either WordPress.com stats is broken, or somehow template layouts are confusing it (which I find hard to believe). Either way, it’s useless.

I can’t figure out how to read the index page. i’m a newbie and i chose Cystat because it had good ratings but I dont know how to use it yet and the plugin home page and Author home page are in German. Is there an English userguide for this?
Under Todays traffic (without Bots) it shows:

Hits (-129) Last value: 137 8

What does this mean? -129 hits? whats last value mean? 8 (???)

Im lost
Please help.

This means that CyStats registered 8 hits (page requests) today, yesterday there were 137 requests counted which makes a diference of of -192 requests (this number is colored red if negative, green if positive).

ABout the difference – different statistics tools use different algorithms to count visitors, different timeframes for ‘one visit’ (configurable e.g. in Cystats admin panel, defaults to 300sec I think, other tools use 1 day per default,…), some rely on activated javascript, some do not, some require to insert a counting code snippet into the pages to be counted and every other page will not be counted, some do count 404 pages, some do not,… and finally some do good work at sorting out robots and some do not – cystats currently counts robots with a fake user agent like of MSIE as real visitor – so if a bad bot with a user agent like that makes 2000 requests it will be counted as unique visitor according to the timeframe used (300sec default = one unique visit after every 5 minutes).

This is an issue which I am working on – good robot detection.

So a Hit is a 300 second visit and a unique visit is one that lasts 5 minutes?

Thank You I know understand the last value and red/green +/- stuff.
You were a big help.

Well, lot of good information above. Is there any other good source to read more about stats, hits, unique visits in terms of various statistics tools? Anyone tried to compare all of these plugins?

DaMsT: Can you share your findings?

Thanks again for the continued discussion. I would be interested in a comparison of different stats plugins as well.

The last segment at the bottom of the stat page show IP#s OS Browsers, Date and time,URLs In the URL column I find a lot of 404 errors the URL “/wp-content/themes/auroral-theme/none” this leads to a 404 error message on my web page.

Why is this occuring?

And is it something I can fix or need to fix?

@sbscheema, sorry don’t have any data left. Only running awstats right now.

Funny, CyStats reported some of my highest numbers (visits) for 7 days in a row and ever since (several days now), my numbers have plummeted. They’ve never been this low in the 3 months I’ve been using it. Strange.

I have just added StatPress Reloaded and will see how it compares.