YOU CAN NEVER put your faith in a single metric because if its measuring stick fails, you look stupid. If I believed Six Apart's statistics for this weblog, then I would be watching 388 visitors trample through this space every hour since midnight. I'd also be watching a blog whose average daily visitor count is decreasing. The correct numbers lie in a composite metric.
I opened up the back end of irish.typepad.com around 0630 when my dog asked to go for a walk. It said more than 2600 people had visited since midnight, mostly the stun gun crowd and people wanting to download West Wing using Bit Torrent. I looked at my public stats and saw Geobytes had turned grey which was normal for a big surge of visitors. Statcounter showed the average nightly trickle of 400 page loads. What to believe?
I believe Statcounter because I can cross-check its results to very granular levels. You need that kind of granularity if you intend to sell advertising space to Irish businesses since the smat ones (those that pay the most) demand granularity. In past experience, Statcounter's numbers have validated against harvested raw server logs, something I cannot get with Typepad hosting. If you don't mind using a Javascript counter, I believe Statcounter is your blog counting solution. Besides, it's Irish which means it has to be first class.
Statcounter. Recommended
