I’ve been considering trying out SiteMeter lately. I’m glad I didn’t. Turns out they have entered into an agreement with SpecificMedia to store tracking cookies on the computers of those visiting sites tracked by SiteMeter so they can sell your browsing history to their advertisers. They did this without informing their users, even though this new addition causes a slowdown in the load time of member sites. I use Statcounter as my main stats provider, and they refused the same offer from SpecificMedia. Do you use SiteMeter? Have you noticed anything fishy?
[...] I googled away and found out a few blog post that confirmed my initial guessing — here, here and [...]
I switched to Statcounter, but the numbers seem way off. They are much higher than what I had under SiteMeter and don’t match my provider figures either. Have you any feel for the accuracy of the tool?
There is lots of discussion out there about the accuracy of Statcounter. I’ve never really done a study of it to see if I feel it’s absolutely accurate. I do know that the pageloads on Statcounter are almost identical to the Adsense reporting for the two sites I have ads on, so that gives me a good sense of confidence.
Maybe you’re inflating the stats with your own ip? Statcounter has an option where you can block your ip from being logged using a cookie.
I too noticed a difference in stats (analytics has way bigger numbers for pageviews than statcounter, but the unique visitors are almost the same)
Good point Aniela- I didn’t think to mention that.
[...] all over your visitors’ computers, and can cause your site to load more slowly. I wrote a post about this back in April if you’re interested in reading more. It was enough to cause me to write them off for [...]
I have been using sitemeter almost since I published my website in 2002. Their statistic has always been way off related to my hosting provider, but I still use their service as a way to have an idea of the amount of traffic and the referrals URL in an easier way. By the way, they deny the delay of the page loading speed in their FAQ section. – Javier.