hitcounter plugin counts are outrageous

  • jtpedersen

    (@jtpedersen)


    11 years, 11 months ago

    Greetings,

    [Unable to find a way to easily contact the author directly, I’m posting here.]

    Here’s the gist: I use Google Analytics, WP Stats, and (because a publisher I work with uses it) just started using ‘hitcounter’.

    GA and WP Stats are fairly consistent. Trendlines are roughly the same shape. GA numbers (due to scripting) are always lower than WP Stats. Got it, no drama.

    However, hitcounter reports numbers that are orders of magnitude higher, like 60X. A good day for my site is, realistically, 150-200 unique visitors. For hitcounter to claim I’m frequently seeing 3600-3700 in a day is just outrageous. My ego’s not that big<g>.

    Can anyone provide insight as to why hitcounter stats are so much higher?

    Before, I simply took the newspaper site’s reports of my viewership (my content appears multiple places) as higher because it commanded a bigger audience. Now, I have the ability to stats on a single given site, I’m seeing huge discrepancy.

    Thoughts?

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hitcounter/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • deadlyhifi

    (@tomdebruin)

    11 years, 11 months ago

    HI jtpedersen.

    Just to warn you I wrote this plugin many years ago and I no longer use it; But, during that time I have received various reports of counting hits multiple times – although that never happened to me or any of the sites I used it on.

    The plugin fires on “the_post“.

    It seems sometimes “the_post” is called more than once in certain themes and therefore the “count” gets fired more than once.

    If you look at line 147 of the plugin it states add_filter('the_post', 'detectAgent');
    You might want to experiment by replacing this with add_filter('the_excerpt', 'detectAgent'); or add_filter('the_content', 'detectAgent'); to see if that makes any difference – but in the past when these were options I got many more reports of false readings. the_post appeared to be the most reliable hook.

    Thread Starter jtpedersen

    (@jtpedersen)

    11 years, 11 months ago

    Thank you for your response Tom.

    Based on its current performance, this plug-in might best be removed from circulation. Compared to other current solutions (such as Jetpack WP Stats and Google Analytics) it is reporting activity 60X greater. I’m personally observing this behavior on different, unrelated sites.

    deadlyhifi

    (@tomdebruin)

    11 years, 11 months ago

    You’re right. I’ve removed the plugin. I’ll contact wordpress.org to remove it from the listings.

    I’ll most likely release a new version in the future…

    Thread Starter jtpedersen

    (@jtpedersen)

    11 years, 11 months ago

    Just so you know Tom, I look forward to evaluating the new version. Feel free to include me when the time comes, as results@jtpedersen.net

    Cheers!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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