While I'm Thinking About It

Google's Analytics come under some scrutiny.

I have four ways of automatically counting how many people visit this silly little strip of mine. My host, the fine folks at Host Excellence, provide two tools as part of the standard package: ModLogan, and Webalyzer. Project Wonderful shows me (and whoever else cares to look) how many times they've displayed my ad spaces over the past month. And then there's Google Analytics, which, despite my recent temper tantrum over the Chrome OS, I still have running.

Google Analytics, at least since I started using the new design, is almost completely useless.

Take, for example, last Thursday's strip. It was designed to get some chatter going in the shoutbox (and I'd like to thank those of you who took the bait). Webalyzer suggests I had 226 unique visitors that day. ModLogan counted 246 of you. According to Project Wonderful, the square ads were displayed to 53 unique visitors, and the banner was shown to 47. As an aside, are some of you using AdBlock?

According to Google, nobody came around here Thursday. That would be a total of zero readers, despite all available evidence to the contrary.

And before you ask, the first thing I did before starting to hack out the new design was to make sure all the vital code got copied over from the old one. That includes not just the Analytics code, but also the Project Wonderful code and the OpenID information. And, if I made no changes to any of it, and everything else still works fine, then the problem is with Google.

Anyone else with websites notice Google reporting lower numbers than anything else?