TWCL

ComicRank · Joined: 07 Feb 2013 Posts: 3

Hello everyone! I don't suppose you remember lil' old Comic Rank do you? I'm not here for self-promotion, but I am still obsessed with stats.

I've been validating the stats of my beta testers and have noticed that Project Wonderful "Uniques" can be wildly high on some sites, despite no foul play by the owner. Has anyone else noticed this on their comics?

After poking around I have a theory on what is going on, but it would be really useful to test on some other sites first before I jump to conclusions.

If you can help, and have Project Wonderful ads on your site, could you reply with your site URL and the uniques that Google Analytics said you had on February 5th 2013. Here's how:
- In Google Analytics go to "Audience", then "Overview"
- Expand the date range picker (top right) and click Feb 5th twice (to set start & end), then Apply
- Use the number next to "Unique Visitors:", just under the graph

If you can spare the time then thank you! Or, if you know anything else about this please add to the discussion Smile

Also, Comic Rank is starting again soon
You should totally sign up

Sorry! Couldn't help myself...

ttallan · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2013 12:20 am Post subject:

I have two PW ads on my site, and even their two metrics don't agree, with the lower-placed one being a few hundred higher than the one across the top. Which makes no sense to me.

The Google Analytics numbers have always been more grim than PW. I think PW is less "picky" about hits because they want to make the ad spaces look as enticing as possible. But the overall trends tend to be the same between PW and GA, so I don't sweat it too much.
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ComicRank · Joined: 07 Feb 2013 Posts: 3

The difference between the two ads is understandable, your top ad is one of the first things to load, but your sidebar ad has to wait for the entire main column. There's a good third of a second time slot where if someone left your site they'd be tracked on one ad but not the other.

GA can be a bit more picky on what it tracks, but when comparing it to raw requests it comes surprisingly close in my experience. Comparing with PW though the unique counts are way off, in the worse cases they're over tenfold what they should be.

P.S. Make sure you upgrade to Project Wonderful's new asynchronous code when you get the time. It'll balance your traffic count and protect the rest of your site against slow-loading ads.

ttallan · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2013 1:14 am Post subject:

ComicRank wrote:

The difference between the two ads is understandable, your top ad is one of the first things to load, but your sidebar ad has to wait for the entire main column. There's a good third of a second time slot where if someone left your site they'd be tracked on one ad but not the other.

That would be reasonable, if the top ad showed a higher stat count than the sidebar one. But it's the other way around.

The asynchronous code sounds like a good thing. Where do I find it?
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Traegorn · Joined: 16 Feb 2010 Posts: 141

I run my own site tracking via a Tracewatch installation - which separately track uniques and sessions. I've always seen the PW "uniques" match my sessions number, so I'm assuming that's what's happening

ComicRank · Joined: 07 Feb 2013 Posts: 3

ttallan wrote:

That would be reasonable, if the top ad showed a higher stat count than the sidebar one. But it's the other way around.

The asynchronous code sounds like a good thing. Where do I find it?

That is odd, not what I'm seeing on your graphs at the moment though.

The async code can be found by clicking the code button when looking at you ad boxes. It should be then default option.

Traegorn: Yeah, they match up for me as well. If anything PW is a bit low, but that can be accounted for by ad blockers. The massive differences seem to be triggered by a certain set up on the site, but I think (or at least hope) people aren't intentionally doing this.

smbhax.com · Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 3:20 am Post subject:

I don't have Google Analytics, but I have Quantcast, which has seemed pretty reliable compared vs my actual server stats and my Google Adsense stats. I have a little PW button at the bottom of my site, below the Google leaderboard--the default ad there is blank black, so you kind of have to find it by feel. I pretty much just keep it as an easy way to see referrers and *relative* traffic because, in my case, the PW uniques *are* super-inflated for some reason. Anyway, my PW:

https://www.projectwonderful.com/advertisehere.php?id=45324&type=2

vs my Quantcast:

http://www.quantcast.com/smbhax.com
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