11/02/2008

What is wrong with ClustrMaps?

The Day 2 challenge is to sign-up for a service to get real stats on who visits the blog. This is some pretty serious stuff! Read Steve's Blog to see the rationale, which does make sense.

While my new site meter may tell me more, I still enjoy my ClustrMap. I have enjoyed watching the dots grow across the map and some dots have actually grown larger. Even if the dot came by accident I was glad it was still there. It made me happy to think someone stopped by and may even be feeling the same challenges in their schools. My map encourged me to keep writing and I was glad I added it to my blog.

Only time will tell on how stats will help my blog. I hope it doesn't hurt my blogger self-esteem.
at 11:33 AM
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have always wondered what was wrong with ClustrMaps. The numbers have never matched up with the blog stats from Wordpress. They are much lower than the actual visits.

But, like you, I love to see those red dots grow. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

November 2, 2008 at 6:04 PM
ClustrMaps Team said...

Hi... just wanted to 'beam in' to thank you for using ClustrMaps, and to provide a few clarifications.

Far from anything being 'wrong', we take great pride in our accuracy. As it turns out, different counters can come up with inconsistent totals for a variety of reasons. For example, is is possible to get VERY DETAILED statistics from log
analysis software that analyses hits to many pages on your site, whereas our thumbnail map *ONLY* counts the number of times the thumbnail map it is displayed!!

Most of the differences between different counters are explained in the answers to a series of questions on our FAQ page, in particular the section labelled

Explanation of hits, visits, limits, updates

You may have looked at that already, but in particular it would be useful to
go through that explanation in some detail, and then by all means come back to us if you
have further questions - note especially that the difference between 'hits'
and 'visits' will be computed differently by the different hit counter
services, and this may well account for the difference you have experienced.

Overall, the 'coarse-grained' picture provided by all the services will be
very comparable. Oh, and I challenge ANY other 'hit counter service' to provide the kind of fanatical attention to its vast user base the way we do! We try to read and respond to blogs like yours whenever possible.

I hope this helps. Many thanks for sticking with ClustrMaps!

All the best...

-C.J. on behalf of the ClustrMaps Team

November 2, 2008 at 8:00 PM

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