Tap Blog traffic three times bigger than WordPress stats were indicating

I asked Mike if he could make a new stats recording structure, as the one we have from WordPress seemed to be working very oddly, with listed numbers of reads showing patterns that a random number system would not be showing.  This he has now done for the This Week column on the right hand side, where the apparently manipulated numbers were appearing. When I compare his new system with the numbers in WordPress for each post in this list, the difference is about three times.  That might mean that we have not about 40,000 page reads a day currently but more like 120,000 a day, if the numbers we now have are correct.

Not that it matters, as we would all do what we do if the numbers were far smaller.  But it’s interesting, nonetheless.

I could ask Mike if he wanted to check out if the number of daily visits we get is right in WordPress, as 120,000 page reads would suggest an average of 15 pages per visitor, which must be impossible.

We get ‘bots’ reading very large numbers of pages,  dragging up the average, so the average pages read stat would be very hard to arrive at.  Who knows what the true position is?

If we get so many page reads as 120,000 a day, it is extraordinary we get so few comments.  People say they have trouble getting a comment onto the blog.  Maybe people try and give up.  Mike will no doubt have a few more looks at all this at some point.  Meanwhile we at least have some idea how many page views we get for ‘This Week’ posts, and it seems to be very encouraging.  I had noted that our blog traffic hadn’t grown since we arrived on WordPress, and that this seemed odd as we always used to grow our traffic year in, year out.  After I posted that opinion, traffic lifted about 50% overnight, and then became stuck again, as if they thought we were due a raise!

The evidence of traffic stats manipulation is constant.