Toe in the Water

The Problem with Stats

The Problem with Stats

I have to confess that I read my summary stats every day. This comes from my blogging days when the daily stats were an important part of the game, indicating progress (or otherwise) in the battle to be noticed. So now my morning ritual includes study of my WdC stats in the vague hope of learning something.

And it is a vague hope. So far, all I have is an awareness that the stats don’t make sense. Several days in a row they will claim really low numbers of visitors and then, for no apparent reason. a day will come when the numbers soar to twice or three times more than usual. I’m sorry but I just don’t believe that, on certain undefined days, I become flavour of the month and the world and his dog visits me. I’ve looked for a reason why this strange pattern might be happening and I cannot see why I should get such strange results. It looks to me as though whatever program is supposed to be counting my visits goes to sleep on the job occasionally and so misses lots of them. Then, at some sort of accounting point, it realises there are all these uncounted visits lying in a corner and it just adds them to the day it’s in.

That’s not the only odd anomaly in the stats, however. We naturally assume that all these visits are from other WdC members. Not so. The overwhelming majority come from outside WdC. Knowing how difficult it is to get into WdC without being a member, I cannot help but wonder who these people are and how they get in (no, I refuse to block them - they’re more than 50% of my visitors!). Many of them will be search engine bots, of course. Those little spies get everywhere. But they can’t account for all those foreign visits. Maybe my chosen WdC name (I’ve used it elsewhere) is well enough known on the net for it to be googled and my friendly bots tell ‘em where I am these days.

But I doubt it. I was never that popular in my blogging and Facebook days.

Then there’s the number of visits to the most unlikely of the things in my portfolio. Top of the hit parade by a long, long way is my Guestbook. It’s true that I do get people signing it occasionally, but an average of one signing every three months or so isn’t going to produce the stats my Guestbook revels in. It seems the bots love to find out who admits to have looked at my portfolio.

The latest addition, the blog, is hardly in a position to break records yet it already has visits (according to the stats) of over 174 and shows no signs of slowing down. I know I sometimes advertise a new entry to the blog but I don’t get anything like the response that the stats are claiming.

The whole thing leads me to suspect WdC stats. Something somewhere is not quite right and, until I know what it is, I shall take the numbers with a huge shovelful of salt. Even though I admit I do enjoy those days when the numbers break my record!


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