Measuring site traffic

Posted: 10 March 2009

Everyone wants to know how busy their site is, and there are plenty of ways of finding out. The trouble is, they all seem to give different answers – so who is right?

For example, neatComponents provides a component to provide usage statistics – the "Performance" component. This shows, for the whole site, or by section or page, how many page hits are received each day. You can also integrate with Google Analytics, and use their reports to see the same sort of information. However whilst the trends from one time period to another will agree, the precise numbers almost certainly won't. Yet both neatComponents and Google Analytics are faithfully reporting what they see. What on earth is going on?

neatComponents will count those pages which it delivers, but it won't include those pages requests which never reach it – ones which are provided by intermediate caches at ISPs, or from the browser's own cache. All those will be included by Google Analytics.

Google Analytics, however, will only see those page hits from browsers with Javascript turned on, and which allow Google Analytics to analyse their hits. So browsers on mobile devices are likely to be particularly under-counted by them, but included by neatComponents.

So no-one gives the complete picture, just the part they see. However in most cases it doesn't matter too much – concentrate on the trends – and so long as they are upwards you're doing fine.

A quick tip. If you haven't been measuring your site traffic, but want to start now, simply add the Performance component to your site. You'll find that the site has actually been measuring the traffic all along, so you'll be able to see all your historical data too. And that's something you can't do when you turn on Google Analytics!