August 05, 2003

Faulty statistics

I wish to draw to the attention of my thousands of faithful readers (ok, a handful of you) the fact that some of the free statistics tools out there, including one of the most popular, are wrong.

I give by way of example the fact that Site Meter does not track the use of the Opera browser. This is my browser of choice. No matter which version of Opera I use, Site Meter logs it as Internet Explorer 6. Blogpatrol, another free stats tool, shows about 10% of my visitors using Opera. Site Meter shows none.

Site Meter says Dave Barry's Blog has been visited close to a million times, but apparently his readers only use Internet Explorer and Netscape. That's odd. I was certain I was using Opera.

So... there are thousands of sites out there that dismiss Opera, because Site Meter says none of their users use Opera. What else does Site Meter report incorrectly?

Posted by Squiddy at August 5, 2003 10:58 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I use Webalizer, myself. I don't really trust off-site stats programs to be using my information properly... ;)

Another good one that's free for personal use (if I remember correctly) is wusage. It does some great stats, including visitor paths... but is also pretty hard on the server.

Posted by: Darren at August 6, 2003 08:56 AM

Indeed. I have a stats package on the server that generates wonderful reports. Unfortunately, the log files themselves don't store browser or referrer data, so I have to use an offsite stats package for that.

I think I'll write my own to track that stuff.

*sigh...

Posted by: Squiddy at August 6, 2003 11:11 AM