Leaving the Meter Running

Running After My Hat and many, many other blogging sites use the SiteMeter service to track statistics — not just the number of visits and page views, but where they came from, how long they stayed, and so on. I thought the following news might be of interest to anyone who uses SiteMeter and might have missed the information.

First, SiteMeter is moving to a new platform — probably different hardware, certainly different software — next weekend, September 13th-14th. You can read about the upcoming changes, including the reasons for them and so on, in a couple of entries at the SiteMeter blog. But I thought these items would be of special interest:

• “The SiteMeter Website will be unavailable during the Weekend of the Migration (tentatively scheduled for the 13th-14th of September). Your stats will still be tracked during this time but access will be restricted, including access from your SiteMeter tracking icon on your web pages.” (You won’t lose any statistics already gathered, either, although “You may have a small gap in your data while we switch all accounts over to the new platform.”)
• Visit counts and page-view counts will be slightly different (higher or lower, depending on the specifics of your site and your SiteMeter account) but more accurate under the new system.
• Access to your account info: You’ll have to do something they call “activating” your account(s) to gain access to your new stats. (Presumably this means a one-time extra step, perhaps to set a new password, confirm your email address(es), and so on.) Also, account passwords will now be case-sensitive — that is, if your password is “MinorKey” you won’t be able to access it with “minorkey” or other variations; the capital letters will count.

On another SiteMeter-related note:

I was puzzled by something I was seeing in my own statistics — visitors who had apparently arrived at a page and departed it in the same instant, in that the duration of their visits (the “visit length) was zero seconds, as shown here.

(I mean, I’m not so puffed up that I imagine visitors come here to, y’know, roll my words around in their mouths, savoring them for minutes if not hours at a time, wondering how they’d possibly survived all those years without the pleasure. But all the immediate hello-goodbyes were tough to accept, especially when I knew the person who’d visited at a particular time.)

So I emailed SiteMeter tech support. The answer, maybe, should have been obvious. It certainly reassured me.

Turns out that although SiteMeter “knows” the date and time when someone has arrived at a given page, it has no way of knowing when they leave that page… unless the visitor clicks a link on that page which takes them to another. The duration on Page A, then, becomes the difference between their arrival at A and their arrival at B. (And once they get to B, of course, there’s no knowing how long they’re there, unless they click a link.)

SiteMeter doesn’t know that a visitor has closed his/her browser. It apparently doesn’t know that s/he has used the browser’s Back or Forward buttons. It knows about the visitor’s interaction on the page.

So if you too were wondering about all those fickle visitors, relax.