It'd be nice to average closer to 200 unique visits a day, but I know I don't. I'm probably closer to the 100 mark. Today, my counter seems more fucked up than usual. Take a look at the numbers:
It's been reading "0" since this morning, which simply isn't normal. I usually get at least one curious bungwipe per hour, if not more. It's possible that I really haven't had any visitors for a long stretch, but the probability is so low that I'm more suspicious of the counter software than of lackluster readership. Another reason for suspicion is the daily average. As you see in the above screen shot, it reads 161, but look at the graph of my weeky traffic:
Not a single peak in the graph goes above 156. How, then, is SiteMeter calculating a 161 average?
Don't trust your counters, folks. They mean very little. As a result, sites that rely on traffic counters and linkage data, like TruthLaidBear.com, are generally bullshit except for dealing with huge differences in traffic and links. If you've got a counter on your site that "ticks up" a point every single time you hit the "refresh" button on your browser, then you've got inflated numbers: your counter's making no distinction between unique visits and page views. SiteMeter, to its credit, makes such distinctions, but apparently it's having an off day today. Beware the data collectors. They skew perceptions.
Don't trust any program over 30K.
_
No comments:
Post a Comment