Repetition

[cab98]

I first installed the stat counter on Feb 3rd to try it out and had intended to upgrade on the 1st of March, since I plan to advertise the site.

However I see what appears to be a glitch in the system which is leading to a possibly very inflated count. I have repeatedly noticed that certain visitors to the site come in through a search engine... however the stats have often shown this same person coming in as many as ten times to the same page from the same search.. often as little as seconds apart. Bearing in mind that this is an index page with very few links I see no probability of anyone doing this... without going any further into the site.

This evening I see that one visitor has apparently cgone between an index page and a particular article 17 times in the space of seven minutes. .

I can see one person playing with the buttons on their computer but I cannot see how this could happen over and over again with so many different users. It simply does not make sense unless there is a glitch in the system.

I hope someone is able to look into this and let me know by Monday as my site will be advertised within the next couple of days and I have to have accurate stats. I have brought this up before but received no satisfactory reply and hope I do this time... I have copied out this last example into a Word document if someone would like to have a look at it.

Carol Brooks

Hi Carol,

I can understand why you may think this is a glitch in the system. But users really are the strangest people. And they do the strangest thing. It is not at all unusual for someone to do something like that 17 times.

The beauty of StatCounter is that it catches all that user behaviour. Ordinary log analysis would not, because the pages would be cached in their browser. But we are able to catch each and every pageload.

It is very, very accurate. If your user didn't do that 17 times it would not have been recorded.

I've also noticed that same thing about the search term being repeated. I've added more detail to the magnify stats to help show you in the situation in more detail.

From my own StatCounter users it is fascinating to see, that people often find us by searching for more than one search term, and they will often come back seconds later from that same serch term again. Perhaps after they had visited some of our competitors.

I can understand why you think this is inflated, but I assure you this is truly your REAL and ACCURATE visitor activity. This is what your visitors are doing.

From these results you can really tell that people use Google as their point of reference. They don't use your website as that point of reference.

From the StatCounter stats, it is not until the visitor decides they want to register that we stop getting several hits from that user from Google for the same keywords, and often different keywords as well for the same user.

People use Google a lot when trying to find what they are looking for.

It is because these stats record exactly what happens, it looks wrong. But as I said, I assure you this is what is really happening. Visits do a lot of jumping around.

Look at the magnify stats, we've included the referring link on each pageload to help show you the situation better.

Thx for the feedback though, we want to try to improve the stats we offer. And help you with understanding and making it clearer.