Tuesday, November 18, 2008

You've heard of self-fulfilling prophecy?

OK, so I've got a confession to make...

Last night I noticed that I didn't have too many more downloads to go until my blog reached 1000 site downloads (since I've been recording my traffic and stats). This was very exciting and I really, really wanted to see the 1000 click over.

So in between writing a letter to the local Council (which I may very well blog about once I've cooled down) I kept coming back and refreshing to make certain that I didn't miss the milestone.

I noticed that each time I refreshed another person (or on one occasion two) had viewed the site. This makes sense. Many people check out blogs at night when everything is finished for the evening.

Then I realised that no matter how soon I refreshed again, another person had viewed my blog. Maybe it was me! (Although I'm certain I've fed my own URL into the stat counter so that it doesn't count me)

So I hit refresh again and got to the 1000.

The chance that my site traffic counter is accurate?

... Approximately None.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, Statcounter is usually pretty good. I've got it on a couple of academic sites, and had never had any problems (that I'm aware of) with ghost hits or the like.

On the other hand, the blog I contribute to uses Google Analytics, which is rubbish...

Louisa Claire said...

Yeah, I often wonder how accurate my counter is too! BTW I was featured on WTBAY here http://bloggingaussie.blogspot.com/2008/11/daily-featured-bloggerummm-its-me.html

Givinya De Elba said...

Aw! That happened to me in the early days! I have StatCounter and I was able to put my own ISP number thingy into a list of ones that StatCounter promised to IGNORE then I started getting proper stats!

They weren't as impressive though.

June Saville said...

I woke up to that one too. Mine allows me to wipe out any counts from my IP address but also asks are you sure because you won't be able to undo it? Do they want us to kid ourselves?