5,000th visit from Blog Explosion. 25,000th hit registered by Google ADS.

I've been interested in the relationship between page views that Google sees, page views that SiteMeter sees, page views that Alexa sees, and I've just added Hitmap as well.

All of these numbers have different ways of counting that don't match up. Blog Explosion even uses different counting methods internally that don't match up.

For example, the content management system has logged over 66,000 pages rendered. Some of this will include pages for RSS feeds which aren't picked up by other counters. Google has seen 25,000 of theses pages. They only see the pages that have their ads on them, which should be most of the sites, with the exception of the RSS feeds, and perhaps some webcrawlers. Of course if their service is down, they won't see the hit. Also, I suspect they won't see the hit if the person visiting doesn't have Java enabled.

I've just started tracking with SiteMeter. Based on the first week's traffic, I generated about 5,000 pages. Google saw about 1,800 of them. SiteMeter saw about 1,200, and during that period about 400 came from Blog Explosion.

As I noted, even within Blog Explosion, there is inconsistency. There aggregate visits counter claims I just broke 5,000 visits. However, when I look at the sum of the day to day statistics, I'm at about 4,500 visits.

It is interesting to look at statistics like this from time to time, however, given the variations and how they relate (or don't), they do seem to be fairly meaningless.

Update: I have received a second weeks worth of statistics from Site Meter. For the past two months that I've been on Blog Explosion the correlation between internal hits and hit coming from Blog Explosion has been .23 The correlation between internal hits and hits that Google Ads have seen is .37 These numbers make a bit of sense. However, during the two weeks that I've been using site meter, these factors have turned negative. Over the past two weeks Blog Explosion has a -.24 correlation. Google has a -.33 correlation and Site Meter has a -.31 correlation. I realizes it is smaller set of data, but I find this curious. Is it something about Site Meter? During this period, I also saw a 50% increase in traffic (as measured by a one week moving average of internal hits). Checking the logs, it looks like Yahoo may be hitting my site much more, and this might also account for some of the change.

One other side comment. Over the past two months, there has been essential no correlation between hits on the site money earned from Google ads.