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9.2 million hits

Head Rambles Posted on by

This morning I read a piece over at Nannying Tyrants.

Jay has a go at the anti-smoker Tobacco Tactics website where they are proudly claiming on their front page they have had 1.4 million hits since their launch a year ago.

Since it was launched in June 2012, the website has received 1.4 million hits, with over 800,000 pages served with a daily average of nearly 6,300 hits! These April 2013 statistics, along with positive feedback from users of the site, reflect its success and popularity.

Wow!  1.4 million hits?  But then they are a government funded website and run by the University of Bath.  But even so, that is one hell of a chunky figure.

Until you read on and Jay points out that the site’s own figures show a very slightly smaller figure –

Views total
(Views to non-existing pages and special pages are not included)    412,942

Hmmmmm.

I checked out Ramble’s figures from Google over the same period –

stats

So by a remarkable co-inkydinkle Rambles has near enough the same figures as this commercial site that they are bragging so heavily about.  408,584 compared to 412,942.

But then I realised that they were getting their 1.4 million from their server and a crap little programme called AWStats.  Funnily enough, I have the same programme, so I checked that –

awstats

Now the figures there only go back to last November so I had to fill the gap using averages –

5368620 + (5358620 / 7 x 5)

And that gives 9,215,626

9.2 million hits compared to their piffling little 1.4 million!

Put that in your fucking pipe, Tobacco Tactics and smoke it.

You aren’t the only ones who can distort figures and statistics to your own ends.

 

Comments

9.2 million hits — 12 Comments

  1. *exhales smoke*

    What?

     

    9.2 million,

     

    What?

     

    sounds a bit like walking through Liffey Valley and visiting 200 shops, without actually visiting any shops? 

    • Perfectly feasible if you count every glance or look at a shop from the outside.  And every time you blink that counts as another look.

    • I just did a quick and dirty check….

      A visitor just reading the front page accounts for around 47 "hits".  That's because there are images and other crap to be loaded along with just the [crap] text.

  2. Well analyzed Grandad!  Thanks to you 'n NT for sharp eyes!

     :>

    MJM

    • They just can't help themselves, can they?  Give them any sort of table of figures and they will twist, distort and disembowel it to somehow "prove" their own ends.

  3. Yes, an excellent post from Jay over at NT (as usual), and you illustrate his point admirably. 

     

    9.2 million hits, eh?

     

    Fuckin' awesome, man…(pass the spliff, will ya).

     

    Reality? What reality?

  5. There's all sorts of tricks out there to pump up the numbers. I work for a major university and every single employee with a university-issued computer of any sort is "required" to have the university's homepage as their opening internet page. So….every single time you open the internet, it counts a hit (or twenty). Never mind that the next place I go is anywhere but within there! 

    • Interesting Susan!  Hmm… say the showerless have just five active folks in their little WWW (wicked wiki wigwam), and they each sign in three times a day (twice at home, once at work) and get twenty hits per sign on.  That's 300 hits per day!

      • I have a wee yoke I can run on this site that tests if there is any plugin or whatever slowing the site down.  Running the programme once produces about 30 [Google] hits which translates to around 1,500 AWStats hits – TC's favorite yardstick.  I could sit running that tester all day racking up hundreds of thousands of "hits". 

        It's all meaningless anyway.  I would rather have ten readers a day who bothered to read, than a thousand who just flicked by without reading anything.

  6. AWStats is pretty much useless as it is server/site based. It records every single request as a "hit", this includes requests to load images, robots, spiders etc, every request is a hit. The data provided is pretty much useless as it is not a true representation of what is actually going on within a site.

    I prefer to look at unique visitors, new visitors, returning visitors, bounce rates, page-views, popular pages etc. I know exactly what is going on within my own wee blog. Grandad knows what I use to gather this information.

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