Thursday, December 4, 2014
Looks like SiteMeter's given up the ghost at last
A few weeks ago I began having trouble with my SiteMeter counter. It went blank for a day, then came back with the wrong year loaded, so that it now showed the right date in the month but the wrong day of the week - two days ahead. E-mails to SiteMeter reporting the problem and asking them to fix it brought no response. I might as well have been talking to the wind.
On Monday Sitemeter stopped updating itself altogether. Daily visits and page views showed a big fat zero, and the totals stalled out at their end-of-November numbers. Again, inquiries to Sitemeter produced a deafening silence.
Accordingly, after having used Sitemeter since I started this blog (and having it count well over four and a half million visits), I've terminated it. It's sad, in a way, because it used to be the premier visitor counter and statistics source for many bloggers back in the day. I've had problems with it in the past, but never to this extent. I'm sorry that whoever's in charge there thinks so little of their customers that they can't even be bothered to reply to service requests - it doesn't bode well for the future of the company (if any).
I'll rely on Blogger Stats, Google Analytics and Google Feedburner for traffic analysis. If any other bloggers reading this have favorite statistics counters of their own, please tell me about them in Comments. If there's a strong consensus that one of them is the way to go, I'll look at implementing it here.
Peter
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5 comments:
Yeah, mine was broken there for a while. Took WEEKS for it to be fixed (actually, it just started working....no reply to the emails for support or anything. Strange.
Mine is still working today though.
If you find a good substitute, please email me.
I find that Google undercounts from SiteMeter by over 40%.
@B: Actually, Sitemeter undercounts too - see the two earlier posts to which I linked.
Blogger Stats is an excellent counter for page views, which is its basic metric. If you can figure out the average number of page views per visit (which all blog counters measure differently, IMHO) that can give you a good baseline from which to work. Google Analytics is outstanding for site metrics from a business and 'monetizing' point of view. I also use Google Feedburner to track visitors using my RSS feed.
Between those three, I'm fairly confident that I know what's going on.
I really like Statcounter; it was recommended to me by another blogger who is a bit OCD about tracking statistics. I've had no problems with it, neither on my (now defunct) personal blogs nor for my business site. At first I used both, but I stopped using Sitemeter altogether after a while because I prefer Statcounter's features.
StatCounter. Its what I use on my business site because it handles both HTTP and HTTPS.
Hi, do you think it has anything to do with Blogger? I also have a Blogger/Blogspot blog and Sitemeter crashed with almost the exact same symptoms as you describe on almost the exact same date. I really miss it, although I do use Google Analytics and Blogger Stats too. Sitemeter counts in Real Time. I'd really like to get it to work again if anyone has an idea how to do that. It's saying it's already January...but not counting anything. I had it installed for years and years and years so comparing the Sitemeter numbers was a valid comparison...until 2014. Coincidentally, Blogger and Google are showing a drop in traffic to my blog. Tough way to end the year! Thanks!
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