Is Your Web Statistics Software Providing Accurate Results?

This article shows you how to find out.

Your web statistics software can provide highly accurate results on who is using your website or intranet, but you need to ensure that the software, your web server and web site are all set up correctly.

If you can answer yes to all of the following questions, then your web statistics software will be providing accurate results.

1. Does your website use a tracking cookie to identify individual visitors?
2. Has the software been configured to use this cookie? Most default to using the IP address and browser as the method to track visitors and this is not very accurate.
3. If you are using the web server log files to create your web statistics reports:
   1. Has the software been configured to exclude all search engine crawlers and other robots from its reports? If you are not, then your statistics can be out by as much as 30-50%.
   2. Does your site employ any cache-busting techniques to ensure that all of its pages are being sent to the visitor? If not, then your server may not be receiving all of the requests as they may be held in the cache of the ISP
4. Does your software configuration exclude all the visitors to the site from your office? You might be counting your own staff as visitors to the site and this will affect the accuracy of your results.
5. Does your website have a custom error page? If so is this excluded from the analysis and reporting? A small broken image may be causing your site to over count the number of page views.
6. Does your site have PDF documents to download? If so have you configured your website statistics software to exclude all partial content requests? PDF files are often downloaded in several parts and can exaggerate the results.

If you are unsure of the answers to any of these or answer no to any of these questions, then talk to us, we can help. Panalysis provides a Website Analysis Audit service where we will provide you with a detailed independent assessment of your current web stats software installation, web server and web site.

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