Analytics inquiry

A few days ago I had a fun chat with some Internet people and we were talking about website numbers and analytics. As you know, my site doesn’t have analytics of any kind. I’m not interested in knowing what people are reading and what they’re doing on the site. The only numbers I have available are the ones coming out of the server logs and those are as messy as it gets.

In my chat, we were discussing the discrepancy between log numbers and the ones coming out of the various analytics platforms and were noticing how they all spit out different data. Which to me makes no sense. Still, it’s an interesting topic and I decided to run a little experiment to gather more info on the subject.

From now until next Saturday morning—January 6th—I’ll run four different analytics services on this site. Then, next Saturday I’ll remove everything, grab the data from the various dashboards, delete all the accounts and associated data, and then compare those numbers against a week's worth of server logs.

I decided not to use Google Analytics because fuck Google and so my four picks are:

The reason why I’m doing this now it’s because the end of the year is usually a slow time online so there’s going to be less traffic coming through my site and that means fewer people being tracked as a result of my experiment. Also, I’m not interested in the data itself, I’m just interested in comparing the various results against each other so it’s fine if I get less data overall on each of the four services.

I plan to share as much as possible about this experiment so if you want to learn more about it just come back next week.