The last couple of days has seen a resurgence in the discussion about Feedburner and the growing dissatisfaction with the service – especially since it was sucked into the black hole known as Google Acquisitions. People like Chris Pirillo; who is actually thinking of leaving the service, and Allen Stern are pointing out the simple fact that Feedburner is becoming more of a liability in some ways rather than the excellent service that was usually the first thing any blogger signed up for.
Even myself I have begun to wonder if the flaky service is even worth staying with; especially since posts aren’t getting announced they way they should in other services or feed readers. Not to mention the constant fluctuation of subscriber counts – one day I’m almost at 900 and the next I’m below 500. However this problem with Feedburner in my opinion is only the tip of the stats iceberg. Stats that right across the board don’t even come close to resembling each other.
For our readers this seeming obsession that bloggers have with their numbers may border on unhealthy but the fact is that for any blogger; or blog network, these numbers are our lifeblood. Even those ho don’t use their blogs as a way to make a living the numbers are important in letting the blogger know if certain subjects are resonating more with their readers than others.
In the case of income producing though numbers are the very metric by which we earn our living. Advertisers and companies look at those numbers – they slice and dice them – they ingest them and then spit it all back out with the dollar figures of what you are worth to them as an advertising platform. Good numbers mean the money keeps coming in. The better the numbers the better the money. If you can’t produce the numbers the advertisers want then don’t count on the money you think you should be getting.
The problem is that it doesn’t matter what stats service you use there is no consistency at all in what they are reporting. To prove my point I decide to embarrass myself and show you what my numbers were for January 21 2009 across a number of different stats services.
Just to give a complete overview of my numbers here at WinExtra let’s take a look and see what compete.com has to say for the yearly numbers
As you can see I took a real kick in the balls in November which I have written about before here. The rest of the numbers will have to do specifically with yesterday – January 21 – and we might as well start off with the king of the analytics that everyone in the business relies on – Google Analytics
Pretty dismal eh but wait it is only starting to get interesting because if we now switch over to the Google AdSense page impression numbers for the same day we see something like this
Now granted page impressions are more the count of how many times a page has been loaded in the browser window so typically it would be higher than the visitor count you see in the first Google graphic. However 330 unique visitors reloaded up the page 1,400 plus times .. hmmm .. okay if you say so Google.
One of the other stats services I use is called Clicky and where Google Analytics are available for previous days Clicky provides same day live stats. This though is what they showed for the 21st
Now that’s not bad. Pretty close to that Google Analytics said I had for traffic so let’s check out another service called Lijit. I primarily use Lijit for its search options but they also have a stats package included and this is what I got from them for the week of the 21st (they don’t drill down to single days)
Well .. isn’t that interesting. Lijit says I have had 496 visitors on the 21st which is more than either Google Analytics or Clicky said I had. Up until this point the stats have come from third party suppliers but one of the nice things about Wordpress is that there are a number of really good stats plug-ins available. The one I have been using most recently is called StatPress and this is what it shows my traffic as being
Wow .. according to StatPress I had 863 visitors on the 21st which is more than double what any of the others said I had.
What does all this mean from a blogger’s point of view? It means you can’t trust any numbers out there because at some point one service will have better numbers than another and yet another will be under reporting. What none of these numbers show though is engagement. They don’t show whether or not the blogger is an active part of the community he is writing for or whether he is just filling space around the ads.
The fact is that like Feedburner the numbers being pumped out there as justification for the ad money being made might as well be nothing more than hot air. The unfortunate thing is that right now we have no other way by which we can gauge the number of readers we really have or how engaged they are with our blogs.
Oh and as for my comment about the Feedburner numbers being screwed up
If a company like Google can’t keep the numbers straights one has to wonder just how accurate the rest of the industry really is.
Taking a look at Clicky – analytics for your blog
Yay! no more Friendfeed counts cluttering up my Feedburner numbers
great post – my readers were also halved the same day yours were. google needs to comment on this – but alas they ignore it. remember that rss reader numbers (especially for the big blogs) are a joke because of the defaults.
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great post – my readers were also halved the same day yours were. google needs to comment on this – but alas they ignore it. remember that rss reader numbers (especially for the big blogs) are a joke because of the defaults.
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This is exactly why I track conversations instead of clicks or traffic.
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This is exactly why I track conversations instead of clicks or traffic.
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These discrepancies are a big reason why I gave up paying much attention to these numbers. All the time spent poring over stats could be better used writing posts…
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These discrepancies are a big reason why I gave up paying much attention to these numbers. All the time spent poring over stats could be better used writing posts…
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But why do you even care about RSS readers?
I provide RSS feeds as a service to those who want them. I do not care whether my regular visitors come to my site, read my extracts feed, read my full text feed or read one of my “by subject” feeds – what difference does it make?
The point is NOT how many RSS readers or even how many unique visitors, page views or anything else: the point is simply “Is the site doing what it supposed to do?”. If it's supposed to sell services and you are selling them, it's doing it's job no matter what any of those stats say.
I'm reminded that a few years ago someone offered me $50,000 for my website. I laughed and said I'd need more like $5 million. He laughed and said something like “That's ridiculous, your stats don't support it”. That's true, but I'd have to pay taxes on that money and then invest it to pay me something equal to what the site does, and THAT would take appx $5 million – and THAT is what matters, not fb stats, Analytics or anything else.
Oh sure, I look at the FB stats just like I look at Analytics and Quantcast and Alexa and.. but the main stat I look at is that “Owners Equity” line on my balance sheet. That is reality – the rest isn't.
As to whether or not to use FB, well, I don't want to host all the bandwidth these idiot feedreaders take up. Most of them are checking every few minutes and that kind of junk adds up fast. They pay no attention to the Update Frequency at all.. so I'll stay with FB for now anyway.
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But why do you even care about RSS readers?
I provide RSS feeds as a service to those who want them. I do not care whether my regular visitors come to my site, read my extracts feed, read my full text feed or read one of my “by subject” feeds – what difference does it make?
The point is NOT how many RSS readers or even how many unique visitors, page views or anything else: the point is simply “Is the site doing what it supposed to do?”. If it's supposed to sell services and you are selling them, it's doing it's job no matter what any of those stats say.
I'm reminded that a few years ago someone offered me $50,000 for my website. I laughed and said I'd need more like $5 million. He laughed and said something like “That's ridiculous, your stats don't support it”. That's true, but I'd have to pay taxes on that money and then invest it to pay me something equal to what the site does, and THAT would take appx $5 million – and THAT is what matters, not fb stats, Analytics or anything else.
Oh sure, I look at the FB stats just like I look at Analytics and Quantcast and Alexa and.. but the main stat I look at is that “Owners Equity” line on my balance sheet. That is reality – the rest isn't.
As to whether or not to use FB, well, I don't want to host all the bandwidth these idiot feedreaders take up. Most of them are checking every few minutes and that kind of junk adds up fast. They pay no attention to the Update Frequency at all.. so I'll stay with FB for now anyway.
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If you think you're confused now, try adding a few more stats services into the mix. I spent many hours over this past week figuring out how three different services could get such a wild difference in actual CONVERSIONS. What seems simple is anything but.
Google Analytics says 0, Yahoo Analytics says 2 and ShareASale claims credit for 11.
The bad news: they're all accurate for the way each of them counts those conversions. Watch my blog for details on how that could possible be – and also for advice regarding how not to end up destroying your sales because your decisions are based on numbers that don't measure what you think they're measuring.
For bloggers and advertisers perhaps some consensus on whose numbers to use – or taking an average of the most accurate 2-3 – might be worthwhile.
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If you think you're confused now, try adding a few more stats services into the mix. I spent many hours over this past week figuring out how three different services could get such a wild difference in actual CONVERSIONS. What seems simple is anything but.
Google Analytics says 0 sales were generated by traffic from ShareASale, Yahoo Analytics says they sent 2 buyers and ShareASale claims credit for 11.
The bad news: they're all accurate for the way each of them counts those conversions. Watch my blog for details on how that could possible be – and also for advice regarding how not to end up destroying your sales because your decisions are based on numbers that don't measure what you think they're measuring.
For bloggers and advertisers perhaps some consensus on whose numbers to use – or taking an average of the most accurate 2-3 – might be worthwhile.
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Feedburner really frosts me. My numbers are significantly less than yours but fluctuate wildly like yours do. Yesterday my subscribers read 102; today they read 78. The difference? PRECISELY the number of email subscribers Feedburner says I have. This happens once a month or so for 2-3 days at a time, and then it bounces back. So what I get from this is that at some point each month, Feedburner will fail to count the email subscribers, and then do a little course-correction and fix it. If Feedburner could fix this issue once and for all, instead of scrambling once a month, I'd find them much more reliable.
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Feedburner really frosts me. My numbers are significantly less than yours but fluctuate wildly like yours do. Yesterday my subscribers read 102; today they read 78. The difference? PRECISELY the number of email subscribers Feedburner says I have. This happens once a month or so for 2-3 days at a time, and then it bounces back. So what I get from this is that at some point each month, Feedburner will fail to count the email subscribers, and then do a little course-correction and fix it. If Feedburner could fix this issue once and for all, instead of scrambling once a month, I'd find them much more reliable.
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