Proof of the Sitemeter Anomaly
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 4th, 2007 5:27 pmI just finished conducting a test that proves my hypothesis of Sitemeter’s overcounting of visits to high traffic blogs.
For my test I selected my other blog home, Hugh Hewitt’s Townhall blog, as it allowed me brisk few minutes on the 100 recent visitors list. Any blog with more traffic would not have allowed me enough time to collect the data I needed, but would also magnify this anomaly many times over.
Below you’ll see my first visit (#17,433,056) and first page view on Hugh’s main page at 4:33:39 PM:
This is what my visit looked like in Sitemeter after clicking through on a post at 4:34:24 PM:
That’s me on the Visitor Details screen as it was about to get dropped from the list. Note that my ISP, my initial visit time, and my visit length tracks perfectly with screenshot #2:
I clicked back to Hugh’s blog at 4:36:43 PM, after I had been dropped. This resulted in the following new visit (#17,433,195) being counted, a full 26 minutes, 56 seconds short of Sitemeter’s claimed 30 minute window:
A couple of other findings:
- Opening an internal link in a new page in Firefox triggers an entirely new visit. This shows that session cookies are being used, but only within the confines of the recent visitor list.
- Your position on the Recent Visitors list is determined by the time of your first page view (see above). So it’s easier than I thought to get multiple-counted even if you feverishly click every link. You’ll get dropped and double counted no matter how active you are in that period.
Meryl Yourish has told us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, quoting Sitemeter’s FAQ chapter and verse, and calling me a technical neophyte. Tom Maguire also conducted his own tests supporting this hypothesis.
Readers are encouraged to try and duplicate this test.
UPDATE: Allah wonders if I navigated away from Hugh’s site between the second and third page views. The answer is no. I may have opened other tabs, but my window on Hugh Hewitt’s blog remained intact.
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Tagged: blogosphere 
sitemeter
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