Good Vibrations Dept.
You say visit, I say visitor
Stats! Stats! No, bear with us, this might be important....
There's been a right old bunfight over the claimed stats of Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes this morning. Leading the charge: well-informed obsessive Tim Ireland. He's jumped on a screengrab Iain Dale's put up of his Google Analytics stats (available at the bottom of this post) which shows that Dale's been making a basic error in his stats: he's been claiming "visits" means "users."
Now, we've been in many meetings over the years with clever people in suits whose eyes glaze over at statistical definitions, but suffice to say: Dale is completely wrong, and Ireland is completely right. A "visit" is a session spent on a website in which one or more pages are looked at. A "visitor" is someone who makes a visit - ie, a user. Dale's screengrab clearly shows that his "visitors" in March were only 53,255. Not the 240,000 or so he's been claiming - that number was "visits."
It's no good everyone jumping up and down about this: Dale's simply wrong. And he might be even more wrong than he knows, because if a significant percentage of his users delete their cookies (oh no! now he's mentioned cookies! stop getting all technical on our arses!) that will inflate his unique user count artificially, because each time a cookie gets deleted that user will be counted as a new user. So if I delete my cookies every week, I'll be counted as four users within any given month, not one. Most websites (Yahoo! included) divide their "apparent" user number by at least 2.5 to get a more realistic view of their numbers (if you want more punishment on this, try here).
So, to summarise: Iain Dale doesn't have nearly as many users as he's been claiming. Guido's been less forthcoming - no Google Analytics screenshots for him, no sir. [UPDATE - He has put an Analytics screengrab up on the Devils Kitchen comment thread; his monthly users were 79,000 in March. Grab at the bottom of this post]. But given his Hitwise data shows him running neck-and-neck with Dale on market share, we suspect his figures are in the same ballpark.
And finally, our award for most bizarre post on this subject: Dizzy Thinks, who compares Ireland's stats obsession with the left's obsession on inflated casualty figures from Iraq. A comparison so convoluted that it makes us want to talk about cookies again.
Why on earth should anyone care? Clearly Guido and Dale are the big gorillas of UK political blogging, as anyone who's ever been linked to from them can attest. But they're nowhere near as big as they've been claiming. And what about MessageSpace, Paul Staines' advertising platform which claims 700,000 unique users a month here. Is that a real "unique user" number or a "visitor" number? And finally, what does all this say for how big the British political blogosphere actually is?
Now, back to the sex and drugs and expenses and stab jackets.
Iain Dale's March Analytics screengrab:
Guido Fawkes March Analytics screengrab:
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4 Comments
And I imagine there are quite a number who, like me, use several machines a day from different IP addresses.
We do this just to confuse matters further.
Dizzy claims to post just to "get a reaction".
And sometimes it's better to ignore strangers who shout on buses.
I view Guido and Ian and Kevin McG etc through Google reader. Their whole post is shown so I don't have to lick through to read. Do those still count as visits, visitors, hits or whatever?
Click through not lick through. - Yuck!