How to Monitor a Website and Get the True Picture

a) Do you have a website with some type of monitoring in place?
b) Is it accurate?
c) How can you tell?
d) Do you compare it to any other statistics?

One big mistake many people make is only using one type of measurement or service to monitor a websites statistics.

If you only use a single way of monitoring how can you tell if the service is giving accurate information?



This is why it’s essential to use more than one when deciding how to monitor a website

Personally I use around 6 different types to give me a clearer picture, this way I can see if a service has given wrong information compared to other services.

How can 3 different website monitoring methods all monitoring the same website give different results?

1. Google Analytics
Very good information, nice drill downs, and on the whole very accurate

2. Hosting service
As my website is an SBI site, they also provide free web stats, and although not as thorough as Google they provide a clear picture.

3. Google page rank
Google gives a rank of between 0 and 10 for websites, 10 being the highest

4. Alexa
Alexa gives their own ranking via people with the Alexa toolbar visiting your site, although not the most reliable way as many people may not have the tool bar it still works as a general tool.

5. Pages in search engines or domain name searches.
The number of pages in search engines or sites with links to your site should influence more traffic as this increases.

6. Earnings
Unless you have had major overhaul of your site or ads your income should increase at a uniform rate as the traffic increases, if the amount deviates from the uniformity either in a positive or negative sense this will point towards a change somewhere.

Being flexible
Being flexible in your approach to your stats is the key, otherwise you can easily become too engrossed in a single statistic and think your website is going in one direction in terms of traffic, whereas there is really something else happening.

For example
I have witnessed the Google page rank on my site go from 4 to 3 to 2, and 2 to 3 to 4 on my wife’s site when this first happened I was very confused, but after speaking to other website owners I found out many other websites Google page rank had decreased and increased, so I guess it was a general Google re-shuffle.

Had I paid more attention to the other indicators/statistics such as Google Analytics and SBI traffic reporting I would have seen that the traffic had actually increased, and also the earnings even though the Google page rank had decreased. On my wife’s website which still currently has a Google page rank of 4 the traffic remained constant.

Quite why Google had a re-shuffle who knows and I guess we’ll never find out, but the main thing is other services/methods had reported increases on all fronts.

Why should different statistical methods or services give differing information?
This could be down to things such as service downtime.
The service is not installed or running on all pages on the website being monitored.
Some services count your visits and some do not.
If your stat service is connected to a search engine, do they count their own spider/bot visits?
Does the service rely on visitors having a third party toolbar installed, such as Alexa?

Read the next page on how to monitor a website

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