stevehale:Hi all,
I was wondering how acurate the analytics and zenfolio vistor counts are?
Only when logged into my zenfolio it tells me there has been 132 visitors this week (unique visitors I assume?)
The weeks count on my analytics tells me 49 unique visitors and 145 total visits?
Anyone else compared the two?
Regards
Steve
I'm really not sure of the algorithm that Zenfolio uses to count visitors, so it's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison between the two. I do know from personal experience of designing a visitor-and view tracking system for large-scale websites that tracking visitor statistics is a hit-and-miss proposition at best, and that by the very nature of how HTTP works you can never say with 100% certainty whether a visitor is "new" or "existing"; there are just too many uncertain variables in the equation. The best you ever end up with is a best-effort guess based on the preponderance of evidence.
I think you will probably find these two FAQs from Google Analytics to be very informative about how GA operates and counts statistics :
Why does Google Analytics report different numbers than other web analytics solutions?
What's the difference between clicks, visits, visitors, pageviews, and unique pageviews?