Donald Schneider

Does anyone here have Google Analytics tracking one's website, please? I installed it on my personal website a little over a month ago, and I find some of the data provided to be rather mysterious and somewhat doubtful.

Firstly, my website has been generating about 120 hits a day during that period; a drop in the bucket for commercial sites and sites devoted to more popular subjects than my own, but very good for my type/subject non-commercial, amateur site—or so it would seem. During the period in which I have had GA, my site's hit meter has registered about 5,200 hits, while GA indicates I have had only 340 visitors.

(Note: What GA refers to as "Visitors" seems to be what others refer to as "unique hits;" that is, the number of different people (from different computers) that have visited. What GA refers to as "Absolute Unique Visitors" seems to simply mean the number of different people who have thus far visited the site only once, a statistic that is meaningless for me.)

Thus, GA is indicating that 5,200 hits on my site were accounted for by just 340 people? Although it is flattering to think my readers are so loyal that they apparently drop by so often, I am somewhat skeptical at this as I only am able to update the site twice a month on average.

Conversely, GA has Visitors broken down (under "Visitor Loyalty") by how many times each one has visited thus far. According to GA, for example, 89 people have thus far visited between 101-200 times (in just a little over a month?). Even if one uses the 101 figure, that would be 3,789 more visits in that category alone than I have had in raw hits as totaled by my site's hit meter.

Another strange aspect is that on some of my multi-page articles—where one must click from one page to the next to read on—, GA indicates that more people visited the second page of an article than the first; more the third than the second, etc.. I don't see how that is possible as one must first go to preceding pages before advancing to subsequent ones. (I suppose someone could go through an article once and then bookmark later pages of an article to then go directly to them. I don't, however, find that very likely or logical.)

The purpose of my note is not to complain as GA is free, and I do appreciate the service. GA does give most interesting and valuable data such as what people put into search engines to find a site or what sites they had been referred by. I was just interested in comparing notes to see if others have had a similar experience with GA and thus insights.

Thank you.