Hi guys,
(contextual: no dev skills whatsoever, basic wordpress knowledge as you will probably find out by my question)
Probably (it there is a problem) this is not Newspaper/TagDiv related but maybe you can help me finding the best tool/solution to sort this out.
I’ve read plenty about the issue: differences between server (Awstats) / Analytics / Adsense traffic. I know enough to expect different traffic figures between the three based on the major issues in hand (server stats doesn’t comply with the tighter GAnalytics rules and Adsense might not be serving all my pageviews.
Nevertheless i find the diference in figures much bigger than the average difference ratios mentioned online so i was wondering if you would suggest any audit tool/service in order for me to check the health of the analytics tags on my newspaper powered website. I’ve just registred to PowermyAnalytics.com but i was wondering if is there another way for a Newspaper theme user to check tags (and any other relevant issues that might be affecting these numbers).
Sharing the figures:
Website: http://www.goalpoint.pt
AWstats traffic for May15 (visualized traffic):
19,014 unique users 34,403 sessions 583,123 pageviews
Analytics traffic (same period):
15,719 Un. Users 21,556 sessions 106,217 pageviews
Adsense traffic (same period): 39,502 pageviews
Hope anyone can advice me on this, thanks in advance,
Pedro Ferreira
GoalPoint
Some traffic not caught due to anonymous browsing; some things not tracked due to duplicate visitors vs unique visits; some duplication from same IPs (e.g., AOL, cable company) may not be counted twice even though two visitors (some systems look for some other data, some just count two people using same IP as same person, not unique).
Google never gets all visits as javascript doesn’t work all browsers, alt image pixel may be blocked by adblocker software, etc.
AdSense may combine all ads served (2 ads per page 10,000 visits = 20,000 impressions) dpending on what you look at.
We have found using something like PIWIK (open source) running on server is middle ground. if you have dedicated server, worth looking at 🙂
Or, go by AWSTATS which is counting content actually SERVED by the hardware/software and will be more accurate. If your website serves 10,000 pages – then that is how many pages got served. Period.
Thanks Chris,
Great input.
One more (newbie question). I’ve read something about duplicate urls specially in WordPress websites meaning that i bought a WWW domain (www.goalpoint.pt) and it works (redirects automatically) but my real website URL is (http://goalpoint.pt). Does this have an impact on these stats? Should i be doing something codewise reagarding this to make my newspaper/WP website better in SEO terms?
I ask this because another warning I’m getting via SEO site checkup is this:
Your site’s IP does not redirect to your site’s domain name. This could cause duplicate content problems if a search engine indexes your site under both its IP and domain name.
Also some of this tools say this:
URL Canonicalization Test – OK – http://www.goalpoint.pt and http://goalpoint.pt resolve to the same URL.
while others say i’m missing a 301 redirection of these URLs to the same final URL.
Confusing, specially for a newbie (it’s a miracle i have the site up and looking good with the kind of skills i have, says wonders about WP and TagDiv), and specially worrying about SEO levels.
Thanks in advance for all the feedback, much appreciated,
Cheers,
Pedro Ferreira
You should have a 301 redirect from any “alt name” URLS to your main URL.
So if main site is
mysite.abcd
and you have alt
like
mysiteisneat.abcd
then the second one should point at first with 301 redirect; both should not “resolve” … in other words only ONE version should show up on web if somebody types in the URL. Same with www vs non www, http vs non https, etc.
There should only be ONE version of your site that ‘resolves’ on the web; this will avoid all canonical and duplicate content issues!
🙂
