Wrong number of visits and visitors?
-
Hello
I’ve suspected a problem in the way of counting visits for years but now, it’s obvious. It’s about 18:19 here in France, there is 0 visit on my blog today according to the visit counter when I go to Jetpack stats but when I visit my own blog wih another device without using an anonymiser (Tor Browser, etc), even after waiting for half an hour, Jetpack stats still indicate 0 visit and 0 visitor. Please can you tell me what is wrong?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
The web page I visited more than 4 hours ago with another device still doesn’t appear in the visits.
-
Hey there –
Thanks for writing to us.
When I look at the dashboard I am seeing visitors logged. Are the numbers on this page incorrect by your estimation?
-
Yes for Saturday. Moreover, I visited my article about Bouillon Chartier for my little test and it doesn’t appear in the list of visited pages for Saturday.
-
Hi there!
Your own visits are not counted against your stats unless your site is private. This is by design. That may be the reason the numbers are off by your estimates.
-
I wasn’t logged in WordPress on the device used for the test. Therefore, my visit should have been counted.
-
Hey there,
Many thanks for reaching back out.
Out of curiosity – what browser was in use exactly?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
-
-
Hey there,
Many thanks for reaching back out with that information.
To check, are you referring to this article: https://gouessej.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/le-bouillon-chartier-restaurant-francais-a-paris-le-bouillon-chartier-french-restaurant-in-paris/ ?
Additionally, are you using any kind of VPN or any browser extensions?
Many thanks in advance.
-
Yes I was referring to this article.
I don’t use a VPN on this device. I use Ublock Origin. If you really think that something can affect the views, I’ll retry after disabling all extensions.
-
Hi there,
Yes it is possible that this may have some effect. Website visitor stats are not an exact science since they cannot be read directly. Instead they are interpolated from the following data points:
- IP address
- WordPress.com user ID (if logged in)
- WordPress.com username (if logged in)
- user agent
- visiting URL
- referring URL
- timestamp of event
- browser language
- country code
It can be the case that when testing your own visits you may be logged out, but we can still see your IP, country, referring URLs, and other info that lead our stats package to believe that you may be the owner, in which case it would filter that out of visitor stats. It’s unclear how Ublock Origin would affect this.
It’s also worth noting that due to the indirect nature of counting stats there can sometimes be grey areas and inconsistencies where the numbers do not always match up. For example, unique weekly visitors can sometimes be less than the sum of daily visitors for the same week. The same goes for unique weekly visitors being less than your total monthly visitors. This occurs when the same visitor appears multiple times during the week or month. We cover this in more detail here: https://wordpress.com/support/stats/#how-traffic-is-counted
With this in mind it’s better to think of stats as a tool for understanding larger trends (like why some posts get 10,000 views, while others get only 5,000) and not as much a tool for accurately counting the difference between 10 visits and 11 visits. Due to rounding errors small details like that may get missed, but the larger overall trends are still valuable and worth understanding.
If you are looking to get the most detail out of your visitor stats we instead recommend activating Google Analytics, which is the industry standard for web traffic professionals and will offer much more access to traffic data:
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking traffic to your site. This guide will show you how to add Google Analytics to your website. This feature is available on sites with our WordPress.com Premium and Business plans. Commerce plan customers click here. If your site has one of our legacy plans, it is available on the Pro plan. Jetpack Stats Versus Google Analytics Jetpack SHope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
-
I’ve never been logged in WordPress on this device and my mobile operator obviously uses dynamic IP addresses. A similar problem happened several months ago with another device (FairPhone) I don’t own running Mozilla Firefox under Android.
When I started using WordPress in 2010, I had access to detailed information about the referrers and the stats weren’t wrong for several consecutive hours. Work must pay (and I have a Personal Plan) but I won’t switch to a Business Plan to obtain more accurate stats. Matomo Analytics is recommended by the CNIL and exempt from consent to tracking unlike Google Analytics. If you have a more affordable solution to suggest based on Matomo, I’ll seriously consider it. I understand why Google Analytics is advised but it doesn’t fit into my constraints, I don’t want ads and/or tracking on my website. Computing quite accurate stats without heavy tracking is technically doable even though it’s tricky. I intentionally disabled Google AMP, I bought 3 smartphones under GNU Linux, I’m not the kind of person who would accept using a Google product just because it would be useful, practical or the industry standard. Matomo is used by many GPDR compliant European professionals.
-
By the way, your comments helped me to understand better the nature of the problem. I’ll have to reconsider hosting my blog on my own server.
- The topic ‘Wrong number of visits and visitors?’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 