Comments on: A Better Solution to Measure the Real Traffic to Your Blog?

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 21 May 2010 08:23:14 +0000

Hey Mayank,

Interesting thought there. It seems like a good way to measure page views for your site. Though it still does not measure how much traffic you got from twitter or from a shortened link, but how much traffic you got in general irrespective of the source.

> So clearly the number of views reported by bit.ly for that image (and not for the blog’s permalink which I tweeted) will be a correct estimation of the number of humans who have clicked on the shortened link in Twitter

Is actually the number of users who visited your blog from any source not just twitter.

Also note that search engines do cache your entire site (including images) and browser plugins like preview plugins will look up the image also.

I like the solution and believe it will provide a better means right now to measure human traffic.

By: Mayank

Mayank — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:35:24 +0000

Kishore,
A very important point you raised. I realized about this problem after writing the blog but before publishing it. So the way I solved the problem was to include a tracking code in my blog’s permalink which I then shortened using bit.ly. Then the image’s shortlink count on bit.ly will have largely two different Referers. One directly coming to the blog and containing the blog’s permalink as its referer. and the other set coming by clicking through shortened link containing the modified blog’s permalink. By only taking the second count I’ll know exact number of people who visited the site through twitter.

By: Mayank

Mayank — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:31:21 +0000

Kortina, that is a real cool hack your sister did on Craiglist. A very nice and innovative way of getting around the problem. You are right in stating that Google Analytics should be used as primary source of statistic. The hack that I am suggesting is primarily to get accurate bit.ly counting disregarding the automatic lookups that browser plugins and some twitter clients do for a shortened link. Bit.ly’s counting becomes important when you want to measure the traffic from Twitter exclusively where you are going to publish your shortened link and would also like to track people who would be viewing the page on their mobile phones which invariably have JavaScript turned off and hence are not measured through Google Analytics.

By: kortina

kortina — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:04:12 +0000

A tracking image is a classic way to measure traffic to a page, and I would agree that it presents a more accurate view of mobile traffic than Google Analytics. The tracking image, however, is more prone to double counting of browser traffic, so I think the best approach is to use Google Analytics as your primary counter, and then use a bit.ly-ized image for measuring mobile traffic.

One place where a bit.ly-ized image has a real advantage is when you do not control the page source or do not have access to Google Analytics, but still want to estimate traffic. Here’s a post about how my sister used to track the number of page views of a Craigslist ad, for example: http://bit.ly/3gTktk

By: fred wilson

fred wilson — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:30:01 +0000

neat idea. i’ll forward this to the bit.ly folks. thanks!

By: Kishore

Kishore — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:30:04 +0000

Hey Mayank,

Is actually the number of users who visited your blog from any source not just twitter.

Also note that search engines do cache your entire site (including images) and browser plugins like preview plugins will look up the image also.

I like the solution and believe it will provide a better means right now to measure human traffic.