A few 
days ago, I got invited to play with the pre-release version of Blogbeat - a statistics service that provides bloggers with an easy way to analyze traffic. It was a coincidence because I had recently added SiteMeter, StatCounter and Google Analytics to my blog as part of a mini-experiment to see how accurately my traffic was being measured by Blogware. Here are yesterday's results
days ago, I got invited to play with the pre-release version of Blogbeat - a statistics service that provides bloggers with an easy way to analyze traffic. It was a coincidence because I had recently added SiteMeter, StatCounter and Google Analytics to my blog as part of a mini-experiment to see how accurately my traffic was being measured by Blogware. Here are yesterday's resultsBlogware
Distinct hosts served: 6,022
Google Analytics
Visitors: 354
StatCounter
Visitors: 420
Blogbeat
Visitors: 287
Blogware is consistently the most ego-friendly because it reports significantly higher traffic than any other statistics package. I'm not exactly sure what "distinct hosts served" means because it could incorporate hundreds, if not thousands, of server hits from search spiders, etc. But does that explains why its results are so wildly different from Google, Blogbeat and StatCounter? Of the statistics package, StatCounter is probably the most impressive because it offers a wide variety of analytical tools at no cost if you're into delving into how your blog performs. Blogbeat provides a nice clean interface but I'm not sure why people would pay $5 a month or $50 a year for it when you can get it for free from StatCounter. Google Analytics also provides a lot of data but it's overkill for most bloggers - unless you're really interested in breaking down the performance of AdSense and manipulating ads to generate more click-throughs, etc. While Blogware makes me feel as if I'm a somebody on the blogosphere, I'm starting to believe that a more accurate picture is I've got a nice, solid - but fairly small - following. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it does explain why Google only generate a $1 a day in AdSense revenue! If anyone is using a stat package that's any good, let me known
Update (Dec. 23): Blogware has discovered a bug in its statistics package, which caused it tocount a unique visitor again - and again - each time they came back during the day. This will cause traffic numbers to shrink when the bug is fixed in January. This is the kind of information Blogware needs to put on its corporate blog, which is lame because it is updated so infrequently. They only spill the beans to me because I bug them!
Update (Dec. 23): Blogware has discovered a bug in its statistics package, which caused it tocount a unique visitor again - and again - each time they came back during the day. This will cause traffic numbers to shrink when the bug is fixed in January. This is the kind of information Blogware needs to put on its corporate blog, which is lame because it is updated so infrequently. They only spill the beans to me because I bug them!