This is inside baseball primarily of interest to bloggers, but bear with me. SiteMeter — the dominant visitor count tracking service in the blogosphere — has quietly admitted that it does routinely overcount visitors to high traffic websites. A blog …

What I’ve never figured out is why most visitors to my site have a site length visit of zero seconds.

This one is easy. They’re not tracking how long your browser stays open on the site, they’re tracking the time between your first page view and your last page view, within a “visit” (which for Sitemeter, is any series of page views with no more than 30 minutes between the two.). So if you click at noon, then on another page at 12:10pm, then go to the grocery store, your visit will have lasted 10 minutes.

“Zero second” page views happen when the time between your first page view and your last page view is zero. That is, your first page view is your last page view, because you only viewed one page. So as the average visit length approaches zero, that is a sign of your inability to retain visitors. But don’t take it as a literal — because even for the “zero seconds” page views, the person probably spent more time than that. What would be better is to say “24% of visitors viewed more than one page. The average time spent on the site for these visitors was 4 minutes” — that is, don’t count 0 second views.

As for the “SiteMeter only tracks 100 visitors” thing by Ruffini — he’s misreading what SiteMeter says. The limit is on tracking visitor details. He’s assuming that if they’re not showing him details for more than 100 visitors, they’re not tracking more than 100 visitors. All it takes to track visitors is the storing of two things: an IP address, and a timestamp.

Yourish is right. And Ruffini is out of his depth. The only reason this is getting any traction at all is because it calls into question Daily Kos traffic numbers. If Gore had won in FL in 2000 by a big margin, no one on the left would have been complaining about “disenfranchisement.” Cui bono?

Answer: Who cares?

October 3rd, 2007 at 10:11 pm

The question is one as to whether there is a defect in Sitemeter’s tracking software. Meryl Yourish makes Sitemeter’s documentation authoritative as to how Sitemeter’s software really works; this seems such an obvious error that I disdain further comment on it. Yourish also relies on experience at Lucent as a basis for a claim as to how visitor tracking usually works. But whether Yourish’s experience at Lucent is relevant depends partly on whether Sitemeter’s software has the defect Patrick Ruffini thinks he has detected. Whether Sitemeter’s tracking works the way tracking supposedly usually works also depends on whether Sitemeter’s software has that defect. Moreover, the way software usually works is this: Software has defects. Meryl Yourish doesn’t appear to have settled anything.

In fact, compare SM’s free basic service to the premium service: for $6.95 a month, SM will provide details for the last 4,000 visits, not the last 100. Which means, if Ruffini’s glitch theory is correct, that a premium account will result in a much lower (and more accurate) visit count than a free, basic account. That’s an odd feature to include in your pay service, especially when bloggers depend upon higher visit counts for ad rates.

It seems someone with a paid Sitemeter account and a very active site can test this point by registering for an unpaid account, adding the second counter to the page for a few days, and comparing the counts. The staff at Sitemeter may be willing to help set up and monitor that test or a better-devised one, unless they already have solid information to settle reasonable questions. It will probably be good for them to take an interest in this matter; it seems an enterprising trial lawyer would.

Romeo13 on October 3, 2007 at 3:10 PM

You’re right. It’s a classic trick and even his own members don’t know what he’s doing.

No, it doesn’t matter — unless the site uses auto-refresh, which we do not.Allahpundit on October 3, 2007 at 5:39 PM

So what kind of activity constitutes or determines a “visit length”?

Does it matter how long your stay on a site? I tend to leave browser windows open overnight and I don’t know if this is getting AP closer to his iPhone.
MamaAJ on October 3, 2007 at 5:39 PM

Good Q, anyone know?

Believe it or not, I came across a site that was advertising more than 10 million visitors per day. Except their numbers are HITS, not unique visitors. Big difference.

Bottom line, install an analytics software and check uniques. If you’re looking advertise, go with a good ad agency, or a well known site who’s advertising is third-party managed. Those are generally most reliable, but more expensive.

The only accurate way is from the server logs themselves.

There is a lot of available software to calculate and consolidate data from the logs of multiple servers necessary for a high traffic site.

Are the traffic numbers for the biggest website on the left, Daily Kos, inflated by about 60% due to an anomaly in SiteMeter that treats each new page view on a high-traffic site as a new visitor to the site? Patrick Ruffini explains:Earlier today, it …

Besides, the fact that Alexa’s statistics are derived from use of its toolbar, which is popular primarily with techies, guarantees that Alexa’s statistics will be badly distorted in favor of whichever websites happen to be favored by that community.

These may be the best tools available so far, but Patrick Ruffini has raised an important question that SiteMeter needs to address — either by showing that its tracking system does not double- or triple-count visitors to high-volume websites during the same visit based on each page view, or by upgrading its software so that it can more reliably track traffic on high-volume websites.

Stat Counter and Google Analytics are much better, as they provide more detailed results in a user friendly way.