Saw this today on ChurchIT’s dashboard and I thought:
SWEET! We got stumbled!
And I quickly began mining the data to find out how we got so lucky with a huge spike in traffic.
Whoops. False alarm.
Unfortunately the data couldn’t be corroborated with the 2 other analytics systems that we use, Google Analytics above and Church Analytics below:
What I discovered is we were subject to a pretty high-end attack aimed at our admin which resulted in some very strange traffic calculations. In fact, it was successful enough to take down our server 6 times last night (we we’re able to restore within 1 minutes of each down).
I doubt anyone noticed.
But, it was a strong reminder to always have more than one reporting mechanism for your analytics since one could go completely haywire, especially analytics which tracks the front of your blog and site (in this case WordPress) rather than attached to the core.
If you’re interested in a good overview and a pretty solid case of why having analytics is good for your (and why having multiple analytics packages) as well as the three that we use over all our properties, check out this post here.
Brian says
I’ve been out of the ‘seizure inducing overly anal stats tracking’ game for quite a while but I’ve never quite heard of a WP-stats attack nor been the recipient of one myself. I do however know that GA and WP do have a very different margin of tracking hits. GA seems to be off by as much as -8% in my findings over time where it calculates 8% less pageviews than WP-stats reports. Not only that, it reports them upwards of 24hrs later. I’ve seen huge spikes in WP only to rush to check GA, having to wait a day or more to get its interpretation of the same traffic as accurately as possible.
That said as I understand it, code directly on your server is always a little more forgiving than offsite scripts. I’m not exactly sure which category your Church Analytics tool falls into. But all in all, I’m more inclined to side with Google’s numbers even though WP’s are more encouraging and up to the minute. In the end, advertisers are going to want to see Google’s as well so it doesn’t hurt to bet on that.
Dom Borax says
I noticed.