Okay, ya’ll. We made a bad call. Once upon a time some of our clients were asking for a process in which they could check their web site stats at any time. Due to server security, we couldn’t just give everyone access to server logs, and the stat counter plug-ins for WordPress are notoriously inaccurate. So, we compromised and installed code for the StatCounter service on all of our web site installations. It was a great success at first. Clients loved having immediate access to stats. But sadly, clients soon began to wonder why their numbers were dropping. Their traffic was evaporating, and no matter how they tried they could not get their numbers back up.
Turns out, StatCounter was under-performing. We checked each of our web site installations against the actual server logs and statistics, and were shocked to discover that the actual traffic on the web sites, as reported by actual server logs, was dramatically higher than what StatCounter was reporting, across the board. Each and every web site was getting a lot more traffic than they thought they were.
So, with that in mind, we’re removing all StatCounter code from our installations. This will, of course, mean that clients will no longer be able to log-in to StatCounter for up to the minute stats. But they were inaccurate, anyway. So what does that matter?
What we’re doing instead is implementing a free weekly service. We’ll e-mail you your weekly stats for your web site on Sunday of each week. We apologize for any inconvenience, but once you see how much higher your traffic actually is, you’ll be pleased with the new results.
We can, of course, provide all sorts of different reports for you upon demand. Browser usage. Users by country. Popular pages. Gives us a yell and let me know what your specific needs are, and we’ll see that you get it.
Again, I apologize personally for any trouble this has caused. StatCounter was a reliable reporting service for quite some time. But now it just makes no sense to use their services any longer. Especially not when we can create better reports ourselves directly from server logs.
Sorry, kids!
~ Wicasta Lovelace
