Q: Site statistics show that I've got a lot more traffic than Blogads seems to register. What gives?
A: There are several possible explanations:
1. Blogads on
every page. Make sure you have the Blogads javascript on
every page of your site. Archives, individual posts, pages with
comments... everything. We can give you credit only for the pages that
include the javascript code.
2. Spiders and
robots. The Blogads server counts the page views by
displaying a 1 pixel by 1 pixel invisible image on your blog, along
with the javascripts. This may differ slightly from your own
statistics, as spiders and search engine bots do not read javascripts.
This can account for a difference of roughly 10%. Also, note that
the number of page views on Blogads pages is updated once a day.
3. RSS.
We also do not count traffic to your RSS feed, since feeds do not carry
blogads. This can account for another 20% difference on some
blogs.
4. Traffic
measurement. If these reasons do not explain the
difference, please install these two free statistics generators on your
site for comparison: Sitemeter
and
Statcounter.
They are simple to use and require little
effort to install into your html code. Other statistics report
generator programs may or may not identify the page views amongst the
page hits accurately. This is caused by endless possibilities that the
url's included in the page can have. For example, certain statistics
generators may think that any hit for .php scripts counts as a page
view, while some of the .php scripts serve images to be displayed on
the page instead.
Another option is to check the page views based on the number of requests
to a page logo (normally a .gif or image file related to the main
heading of the blog site), as this is normally displayed on
every page of the blog. This .gif image has a unique url. Take the
www.blogads.com image url as an example: http://web.blogads.com/blogads3_logo.gif.
You can check how many
hits there are to this url every day and how it compares to the number
of page views reported by Blogads.
5. Still unsure?
Contact us. If you've taken all of the above into consideration and
still feel that there is a discrepancy, please send your raw access
data logs to "blog-tech (at) blogads.com" and we will investigate. But
please
do this only once you've run through points 1-4.
