Why are the statistics inaccurate?

Having now arrived home I have been able to take a closer look at the statistics and they are clearly massively different which is a real concern.  My fault entirely for relying on the Wizzley ones rather than keeping a closer eye on the GA ones.

I am afraid I am one of those people who create content in order to generate income so if the GA statistics are a reflection of reality then I seriously need to re-appraise my approach here.  Similar content on my own sites generates many, many times the number of visitors (actually in line with the Wizzley reported statistics).  So as much as I love Wizzley and the team here I cannot justify the time and effort in terms of generating and promoting content here for a GA reported level of hits.

So some early clarification of the massive difference and some comments on what is being done to address the traffic drift which Tess highlighted would be very much appreciated.

Just to clarify the figures for the last 30 days which I was doing from memory earlier (which proved to be faulty)

• GA says I have had 1,169 visitors in the last 30 days
• Wizzley says I have had 11,035 visitors in the last 30 days

Google analytics says I have had 679 visits to Wizzley during the past month whereas Wizzley says I have had 2525 visits in the last month. That's one helluve discrepancy.

Google Analysis is not going to give less visitors than Wizzley. And if bots and other programming devices are included in the Google figures, then you've had even less visitors than Google Analysis says. The point is why does Wizzley give so much more traffic than Google does? What is Wizzley counting that Google isn't? Is google wrong or is Wizzley wrong? Is there an explanation for the enormous disparity in figures? What is is?

 Questions. Questions. Questions. :)

Tess: 06/25/2013 - 01:23 PM

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And that's exactly it. Google Analysis is not going to give less visitors than Wizzley. And if bots and other programming devices are included in the Google figures, then you've had even less visitors than Google Analysis says. The point is why does Wizzley give so much more traffic than Google does? What is Wizzley counting that Google isn't? Is google wrong or is Wizzley wrong? Is there an explanation for the enormous disparity in figures? What is is?

 

Questions. Questions. Questions. :)

Well my understanding has always been that GA does not include Google, Bing, Yahoo bots in the figures and that seems to be borne out by a quick bit of research over at WebmasterWorld - I am not a technical person but as I understand the bots don't use javascript so don't get picked up by GA

Edited to add - as you say Tess - 10 times the visitors being reported by Wizzley compared to GA is a massive difference which I think we need to understand. 

Gosh I am wishing I had never read this thread LOL as I am quite depressed by it - not your fault at all Tess - I should have been asking these questions if I had paid closer attention to GA

Simon says, "The deviation between Google Analytics and our internal stats is caused by bots, crawler and other non-human visitors. We try to filter out such fake visitors, but that's a rather impossible job, since there are countless bots around and it would be a full time job to keep such filters updated. Google Analytics is specialized on this task - they no nothing else than counting visitors."

That would mean that because Wizzley doesn't have the capacity to remove all the bots, etc. virtually all the supposed visitors aren't visitors at all. They're bits of programming floating around. So this means that Google Analytics is accurate. 

In other words, I'm getting, to all intents and purposes, no traffic on Wizzley. It has puzzled me that my articles never come up when a search is made for a particular topic. 

Well I just looked at the detail of those 1,169 which GA is reporting and this is what it is showing make up the vast majority:

• 602 -  Direct (by which I assume Internal)
• 331 -  Pinterest
• 130 -  Google

That's not good in terms of generating real volumes

So is my content wrong?  On my own sites I can generate traffic with this sort of content

Is Google not that well disposed towards Wizzley?  Is the very prominent above the fold advertising a barrier to that?

As Tess says - lots of questions!

Achim is already on it to write a newsletter about this topic ...

Just to explain the technical questions: yes, we are not able to filter bots as well as Google does, and as a result, our visitor numbers are always higher than those of Analytics. We'v already improved that a bit today, so by tomorrow, the numbers should already be more correct - yet not as accurate as Analytics.

Alexa works pretty good for huge sites on the internet with millions of visitors each month. For smaller sites, those stats are usually more off than our internal stats :-P Alexa is only able to count visitors, if some form of Alexa toolbar is installed. It does't have to be the original toolbar, but any add-on that displays the Alexa ranking in your browser.

Thanks Simon and look forward to the newsletter.  Sorry to bombard you with so many questions but I think a few of us (although obviously I can't speak for others) may have had a bit of a wake up call today.

We are obviously not attracting the volumes of visitors that we need to in order to justify the effort that is involved.

So what does Wizzley plan on doing to make us more Search Engine friendly and what do you need us to do?  The Alexa figures are obviously only indicative but they do indicate a downward trend over the past few months and we all want to correct that I am sure.

Thank you, Simon.

I know it's not my content because very similar articles have pulled thousands per day from search engine traffic and it gets virtually nothing here. Also my blogs pull in more traffice than Wizzley does. I'm not asking for miracles. I just would like to have more traffic than I am having...

I guess I've always focused on my viglink and adsense earnings from Wizzley, and not my traffic. When I have thought about my traffic I use Google Analytics. Partly because I use it for all of my sites. That way I have some consistency.

Viglink has amazing statistics. I love seeing what links people clicked. I hope Chef Keem can answer everyone else's questions.

Very interesting. I've completely given up on viglink. I think they're less than useless. I don't know what figures you are referring to but if I get one click in a month, it's a lot. And besides that, they don't tell me which articles are being read, where the click was, or anything else. I've searched their site for information but can find nothing. i find the site simplistic to the nth degree. 

So I would find it very helpful if you could give me the path and the url which you use in order to get this information. I truly would never recommend the application to anyone.

Regarding the discrepancy between our internal stats and GA we can only reiterate at this point what has been said before: For the most accurate stats please consult your Google Analytics account.

Our internal stats are based on the web server stats, which includes bots and crawlers that need to be filtered out manually to get an accurate picture of actual, human visitors. The tech crew does their best with limited resources, but cannot keep up on a daily basis with the onslaught of extremely aggressive web spiders that plague the web in general.

As someone who runs a web hosting business, I can confirm from personal experience that this is unfortunately true. In fact, anyone who is familiar with web server stats can confirm this. If you want an accurate picture of what goes on on your pages you should definitely rely more on GA than our internal stats.

As for the question of the general volume of web traffic we receive as a whole, or as individual authors, there is probably no easy answer. While some topics and authors continue to receive good to decent traffic, we feel that, as a whole, we could do better. We do our best to keep abreast with content quality guidelines and SEO best practices, because at the end of the day, we are all in this together.

We are constantly looking for ways to improve our standing, and just about everyone who publishes anything on the web would like to have more traffic. Perhaps the general climate for user generated content platforms is just not very favorable at the moment, regardless of our best intentions and efforts.

Whether or not your participation in our community provides the benefits you expect is entirely up to you to determine. In keeping up with Google's vision of a useful web, we may also apply stricter content quality standards to existing and future content. In whatever we do, our priority is to provide a high quality site that people will enjoy using.

Thank you for a fair answer.

Thank you Anne for a very cogent answer.

Thanks for the response Anne

Just a few points to add:

1) Google analytics will only show a hit when your Google Adsense code is used - i.e. 50% to 60% of the number of actual visitors to your article(s).

2) If you promote through Twitter etc. your Wizzley stats will be significantly higher (although the number of 'actual' visitors will, maybe, a few more than normal). Again GA will give a better understanding of any increase in 'actual' visitors.

3) The boost to 'visitor' numbers observed at the first point of publishing is definitely a reflection of crawling activity from bots, spiders etc. 

4) Wizzley stats should be taken as a reflection of the overall activity against your portfolio of articles. That is to say it reflects 'actual' visitors AND the activity of bots etc when crawling. The latter is important, especially where you want others of your web presence to be crawled - i.e. through DOFOLLOW links in your Wizzley articles. Remember that dofollow means that you are happy for bots to go off and trawl the site to which you have linked.

5) It seems that Hubpages has a method of filtering out much of the non-'actual' visitors as their visitor stats on GA do roughly equate to 60% of those reported at HP - how they do it I don't know - maybe they just multiply up the GA numbers (who knows).

6) Once you get your head around the fact that the Wizzley stats are not what they purport to be (and this was discussed about a year ago in the forum) they become a further source of interesting information.
Personally, I use Google Analytics for accurate details about how many times ads are shown upon which I can make some Adsense income. I use Wizzley stats to determine how broad a web presence I am creating when undertaking promotional activities. Seeing the breakdown of the 200 top sites that 'send traffic' means that I can determine which sites are actually visiting.

It all comes down to 'statistics and lies'. You can make whatever you will out of data.
The bottom line is how much income you are generating from each source. That data can only be gleaned from your Google Adsense / Analytics data (or Chitika, etc.), anything else is only showing traffic (of whatever nature). There is no direct correlation between Traffic and Income, although you obviously need some traffic to generate some income.

The query raised about how to generate more traffic to Wizzley, however, is a pertinent one. May I say, at this point, that bemoaning low traffic is perhaps a symptom of high expectation against low promotional work effort. When I promote my own content I get higher traffic - not necessarily greater income, but definitely higher traffic (both 'actual' and bots, etc.).

To give some stats to the issue:
I have roughly 1/2 the number of articles on Wizzley, that I have on HP. From extrapolating visitor numbers from Google analytics I receive approximately twice the number of visitors to each of my Wizzley articles (thus I have around the same number of visitors to each site). Where the huge discrepancy lies is in the ROI: at present, HP generates 5X as much income (I use Adsense on HP not their income platform).
Personally, I would prefer Wizzley to look into the placement and number of Adsense ads available on articles (as it seems ad clicks are more prevalent on HP - Page CTR for HP = 4.8%, W = 0.77%, both having a CPC of £0.13 currently).
As additional info, I have not published on either site for some time (none this year, at least), so data should be consistent. The content profile is not totally alike, but is reasonably consistent.

As far as the drop in visitor numbers in the past month - that I have seen across most of my portfolio (HP, Wizzley, my own sites and blogs). For me, it is a 'summer' thing, in the main.

Hope this helps!

humagaia, thank you, this is stunning information! Very useful. Thank you.

If I unerstood you correctly, then the figures that Google Analytics reports are only figures of people who clicked on Adsense? That doesn't make sense to me, either.

My blogs bring in just as much adsense as Wizzley does, which isn't much, but is interesting. I don't promote my blogs at all, but I do put Wizzley articles on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. i have approaching 7500 followers on G+. 

Tess: 06/27/2013 - 11:12 AM

 

 

If I unerstood you correctly, then the figures that Google Analytics reports are only figures of people who clicked on Adsense? That doesn't make sense to me, either.

 

You misunderstood me, or at least, I did not explain it sufficiently.
The GA reports those visits that have a Google Adwords ad displayed. That's why you only see 50% to 60% of the actual visits (according to the number of articles published at Wizzley).

      I do put Wizzley articles on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Personally I do not use G+ for promotion (although I have an account), so I am unable to shed any light on why you may not be receiving great traffic or ad-clicks from that source.

The question I ask is: How often do you promote each of your articles on Twitter, for instance?
If your answer is "once", then all you are doing is notifying a very small subset of those that follow you on Twitter. The majority will have your tweet lost in the mass of tweets they receive. In order to get to the largest sample of your followers you must tweet it regularly at different times of the day.

Not quite the same for Facebook (and G+?) as your page shows the promoted item for some time unless you promote a large batch in a short timeframe.

So are you saying that Wizzley doesn't have an Adsense Ad on each page? I didn't know that.

I hardly have any followers on Twitter as I have never tried to find followers. I'm just not the kind of person who looks for followres. The followers on G+ arrived by accident. On facebook, I only add those people who  I know in real time for a lifetime. It's about family and close friends. I don't actually add people on G+ much either. I've added about 170 and have about 7250 followers. I think most of them are just fake accounts or dormant accounts.

The thing is that because I just think it's rude to force one's own writings on other people. Wrongly, perhaps, but i do. So I'm caught between feeling guilty that I do so on occasion and the guilt of not doing so because I'm constantly told that I must to do. That's mixed up with the guilt that I'm supposed to be earning a living. At this point, my daughter looks after me and she doesn't want me stressed out because i'm trying to do my part and am not very successful at it.