Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Or “Buh-bye Google Analytics”.
As most of the commentary on my previous post about some statistics from this site (as reported by Google Analytics), the figures seemed… wrong.
Even though the Google Analytics code is included on every page I serve, the two obvious causes were:
- People were blocking it (this seems more common than I realised)
- It’s broken in some undefinable way
Seeing as I have full access to my server logs, I decided to go directly to the proverbial horses mouth and see how the numbers work out from there.
The results are interesting to say the least.
Note: These statistics are purely for the same period – January 2008 up to the date of the this post. This means there may be some discrepancy between the GA figures in my other post and this one.
MPB (Most Popular Browser)
| Google Analytics | Logs | ||||
| # | Browser | Percentage | # | Browser | Percentage |
| 1. | Konqueror | 42.55% | 1. | Firefox | 61.2% |
| 2. | Safari | 41.13% | 2. | MS Internet Explorer | 15.3% |
| 3. | Opera | 15.60% | 3. | Konquerer | 6.7% |
| 4. | Firefox | 0.71% | 4. | Unknown | 4.2% |
| 5. | Safari | 3.6% | |||
Bit of a difference, isn’t there?
Operating Systems
| Google Analytics | Logs | ||||
| # | Browser | Percentage | # | Browser | Percentage |
| 1. | Linux | 45.39% | 1. | Linux | 46.6% |
| 2. | Macintosh | 36.88% | 2. | Windows | 40.6% |
| 3. | Windows | 11.35% | 3. | Macintosh | 6.9% |
| 4. | (not set) | 2.84% | 4. | Unknown | 5.6% |
| 5. | iPod | 2.13% | 5. | Sun Solaris | <1% |
| 6. | iPhone | 1.42% | 6. | FreeBSD | <1% |
Hmm. Some confusion there.
…and the moral of the story is:
Look before you…
No, wait, too many cooks…
That’s not right. It’s never work with animals, children, or a third party statistics package that relies on JavaScript. Especially when you have access to your own logs. So the real moral is don’t be lazy. Here endeth the lesson.
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look good
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
What stats software are you using?
I prefer analytics, just because it gives me a lot more detail, a lot more easily than other stat packages. (Referrers, geolocation, etc).
Also take into account feed readers: analytics can’t record stats for those using linux boxes to pull your rss feed…
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
There are lot of people using noscript. As it comes blocked by default and there is no reason to unblock it, people keep blocking google analytics.
anyway I believe some spyware residents do the same and block some google domains.
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
Good point. Last nite I switched from statcounter to awstats using my own logs and I actually have much more traffic than I ever thought. Statcounter apparently didn’t get everything or, since it was a free service, would overwrite previous stats based on my ‘free’ log size.
I’ll have a tutorial on awstats coming up by the end of the day on my blog.
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
I wonder if Adblock plus does some form of blocking. Because losing 99 percent of firefox users seems pretty vicious, and I’ve never used noscript.
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
We get some google-analytics entries in our 404 logs at work. It looks like some browsers aren’t concatenating the script src correctly, so it ends up looking for the urchin.js file on your server.
Not found:
/.google-analytics.com/urchin.js
Strangely enough, they’re coming from Firefox on Linux, and both IE and Firefox on Windows.
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
Adblockers seems most likely. It’s very unlikely that 99% of even the most tech-savvy paranoid Firefox-using crowd is using noscript (even though that contributes), but just about EVERYONE uses an adblocker, savvy or not.
It’s come to the point where even Joe Sixpack’s mother, Jane Sixpack is thinking "what the hell" when seeing a common news site on an unblocked computer at a friends place. "Is that what it actually looks like? Oh. My. God."
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
It’s AdBlock, definitely. It’s easy to install, and it works. I keep getting surprised when I see other people’s browsers open on familiar sites, because the godawful banner adds and flash monstrosities really detract from the content. And the merest glimpse of someone else’s Google Ads reminds me of 2003.
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
I’ve blocked google-analytics.com (and some other hosts) in some of my hosts files directly. Not because I dislike Google or advertising, but simply because it sometimes takes a really long time to resolve the domain, especially when using a flaky wireless connection. I’m just not willing to wait 10 seconds for a page load which otherwise would take half a second. Which means that I’m usually not counted when surfing the net…
16 Jan 2008 5:04 pm
I added GA to our site. Awstats’ output is quite horrible-looking, although accurate. Google is getting an awful lot of stats from everywhere, for ‘free’ (actually for the cost of providing a pretty UI, and it IS pretty).
I suppose a solution for the discrepancy between GA’s data and the web server logs is for GA to start allowing webmasters to upload web server logfiles directly to GA.
Kirrus "eats because of those adverts", and I say to Kirrus there is no obligation for me to feed you.