The anomalies between the various stats packages popular with WordPress users are curious, to say the least. My StatPress setup reports double the visits recorded by WordPres Blog Stats. And the StatPress individual page views total seems exagerratedly high by comparison. Hpwever, I tend to believe StatPress because it refers to specific view and the total visitors is consistently in keeping with what I imagine a visitor's behaviour to be on a site that has a lot of text and demands some investigation.
At this point I would suggest that maybe WordPress Stats is either under-logging, or over-logging by being closely linked with the wordpress.com global dashboard. Do readers of this forum think that the program might be counting as hits the times when our blogs appear at the top of other people's dashboards as suggested links. Maybe we are being credited with visits that are merely mentions of links to our sites?
My theory is probably bogus, but something is clearly askew. At this moment I will continue to use WordPress stats because I love the interface, and StatPress because I can see details of spiders and RSS feeds. If Google Analytics wasn't so remote, I would go with that, but it's something of a headache and I have to devote half an hour to giving it any serious consideration. Analytics also reports straight zeros for all of my key words, and that can't be right because I've tried to dedicate some time to the theme and wording of my blog. Maybe the answer is to extend WordPress stats to grab more detailed behaviour, such as spiders and URLs, so that we can at least take an average from the various programs available.
kmwalsh
tonytrainor