How do I get accurate traffic stats?

  • abbottwp

    (@abbottwp)


    2 months ago

    I am trying to get more accurate website traffic stats – # visits, # page views, referrals, etc. But all the tools I have tried give me very different results. For example, looking at three sources of data for # of visits during the month of August:

    Siteground (hosting site): 33k

    StatCounter App: 21k

    Monster Insights: 13k

    Siteground hosts the site, and they should have accurate numbers, but Monster is a very popular plugin that uses Google Analytics, so it should be very accurate too. Why is there a discrepancy?

    How can I tell which source is accurate?

    Is there possibly something in Google Analytics/Monster Insights that I need to adjust?

    Is there a more reliable tool?

    • This topic was modified 2 months ago by abbottwp. Reason: accidentally posted before done
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  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    With the prevelance of ad/tracker blockers, some of which have been built directly into major browsers, different visitors will always be blocking different trackers.

    The only truly accurate stats left are in the server access log, which can’t be blocked, because it’s only tracking what the server does.

    Server-side analyzers like https://www.awstats.org , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_(program) , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer can help visualize that, but they’re also far more limited than stats services like Google Analytics, Monster Insights, Jetpack, and StatCounter.

    Most hosting providers offer one of the three, but it looks like SiteGround only offers their own log anylizer: https://www.siteground.com/kb/find-websites-visitor-stats/

    I recommend using that to get a real picture of your total traffic, but for a more nuanced look, and especially to filter out bots from humans, you should also use a third-party stats service, like Google Analytics, Monster Insights, Jetpack, or StatCounter.

    All the tools are “accurate” per what they’re counting. But none of them is perfect.

    Siteground is counting “hits” to your website. That includes human visitors… but that also includes a lot of bots, including even things like search engine bots crawling your site.

    Statscounter is a “hit counter” just like Siteground’s stats, except they make every effort to discount hits from known bots. But they obviously cannot know and discount all bots!

    Google Analytics (enabled by Monster Insights), on the other hand, is a JavaScript counter. This means they can only count stats where JavaScript is available…. which automatically excludes most bots. But his also means any human visitors who has JavaScript disabled in their browser will not be counted.

    By and large, a JavaScript-based analytics tool should give you the closest indicator of human activity on your site. And if you’re going to sell advertising space on your site (or you want to sell your site!), this is the only kind of stats your partners will want to see.

    Whichever tool you use, focus on the month-to-month trends, and not the absolute numbers.

    Good luck!

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