Accuracy of Statistics

MarkHNC

I just joined SmugMug in January, and am still getting acclimated. So I am just now taking up issues I've seen. Here's one of them.

In reviewing Statistics, especially when tracking traffic generated by sending "New Photos Posted" e-mails, I noted that the math on Statistics pages was not always consistent. I'm still seeing this behavior, and thought I'd ask if anyone else had experienced the same problem.

Here's an example from Today. I visit the Statistics page, and click Popularity. At top right, behind "show just:", I click Today. (The surprising limit of one attachment in this forum means I had to create a down-and-dirty composite image of the three screens involved.) The next screen displays the top part of the attached image. I click on Skies and Sunsets and then see the second part of the attached image. Note that the count for Skies and Sunsets from the main Popularity page (23) does not match the total of items on this detail page (28). If I then click Today again, I see the supposedly more accurate numbers in the third part of the attached image (23).

I have also seen this happen when clicking "Back to Popular Galleries," or even when originally visiting the Popularity tab. The numbers will be "wrong" until I again click Today. The same happens when clicking Yesterday. The numbers often do not match. It seems that, after clicking back and forth several times, the numbers start to appear correctly when moving between pages.

Any ideas? Thanks

SamirD

Depending on when the counts are updated, they may be different. They're not in real-time and I've seen variations in how often they update.

MarkHNC

Thanks for your reply. I understand the nature of such updates, but these pages were generated in the moment. In other words, the counts changed when I simply clicked Today to refresh the page. It would be natural for me to find counts to be different at a different time of day, but refreshing the page 5 seconds later, and the numbers matching the summary page only after that refresh, is what concerns me. I intend to use this information to determine not only what I feature/promote, but also what I post in the future.

Would Google Analytics be more consistent/trusthworthy?

Thanks

SamirD

This doesn't surprise me as the different statistics may be generated at different times in order to distribute server load.

Analytics is a much more accurate way to understand overall site traffic, but using details from both systems gives you a better picture.

No stats program is 100% accurate (although I think SM's definitely should be), so I opt to use many different ones on my site. I use statcounter, sitemeter, and histats in addition to google analytics.

Dawnrosie1956

theres a very big difference in the hits reported on here for the day and the hits GA reports, are our our visits counted and do visit from other SMs not count on GA?