Not all hits are being counted

[SteveNind]

I recently had a viewer on my WebCam from russia. The log on my WebCam showed them to be viewing for 208 seconds, 438 seconds and 450 seconds between 13:54:12 and 14:08:54 GMT on 12/12/2003. I checked my StatCounter Visitors and was unable to find any log recorded. The IP address was 217.107.143.68. :?:

STEVE

If someone visits your webpage with the StatCounter code installed correctly they will be recorded.

[mspron]

Really liking statcounter, nice GUI and admin consoles. But we've been checking our internal web log analysis against StatCounter and also find many visits aren't been tracked in StatCounter. We tried building our own javascript stat counter for internal use early this year but had similar problems with not getting all visits tracked and dropped the project (compared to the absolute accuracy of our internal log analysis on our web servers). So we're assuming StatCounter isn't tracking visistors having javascript disabled? I have our daily report in front of me that shows many more IP address visits (including those form AOL, SBC, etc) which aren't showing up in StatCounter's log.

[SteveNind]

In the case I mentioned, my russian WebCam viewer had Javascript running. I have been using my firewalls full packet stats to check all hits to the WebCam page on my site and when I check this with the number of times the WebCam page is hit on StatCounter's log, I see that many hits are being missed. My site does not have heavy traffic, just over 200 hits per day. http://www.btinternet.com/~steve.nind.

[aeduction]

I have noticed the same thing. My website is not yet launched entirely, but I applied StatCounter already to my index-page. I use a dot.tk domain name and it allows me to view statistics of page visitors. However StatCounter is more comprehensive.

The problem is that the dot.tk site monitor has recorded 24 hits, as StatCounter has only 16. Most of the unrecorded hits are from servers from the US. It would be quite nice to get this problem solved, as one third of the hits are left out..

[webmoriar]

From the FAQ:

My log file analysis program says I am getting XXX hits while StatCounter says I am only getting XX.
StatCounter tracks real visitors to your websites. Unlike log files which monitor "server activity" we monitor "browser activity" which gives a very accurate count of the actual number of real visitors to your website.


As for those who have javascript disabled then yes that will be a problem. However, you can check the HTML Only box and track them that way. You won't receive as detailed data but that will enable you to track those with it disabled.

[mspron]

This from http://www.users.csbsju.edu/~eknuth/obcomp/hitcount.html :

As Jeff Goldberg says in a slightly different context, there is a wrong way and a very wrong way to use web counters.

The very wrong way, from the standpoint of accuracy, is to use a counter which relies on Java or JavaScript. The numbers from such counters will wildly underestimate the number of times your page has been viewed and the variety of browsers that your visitors are using. Many people do not or cannot use Java or JavaScript.