So, you started your own blog. You wrote some content then realized you needed new content every day, at least until you got well north of 400 posts, so people keep coming back. Neither right nor wrong it simply is. People come back for content. You need a deep pile of content on various subjects to benefit from search engines. Once the random visitor lands on your site you need lots of interesting content to entice them to either subscribe or keep coming back, preferably both. Then one day you pull up your site stats and see something like this.
Wow, you think. People are really starting to find my blog! I need to see what they really like so I can do more of it. Ah little blogger, ignorance is bliss.
You click around on your Jetpack plugin and find it has article level stats for you. This is what I’m looking for you think. How sad you are about to be.
Yeppers, the math, it don’t add up. The totals they give you for 7 days cannot even add up to a single day’s “visits.” Now your world comes crashing down. You realize all of these statistics are little more than Enron accounting. Welcome to the universal truth of the Internet.
There are lies, damned lies and site stats.
Every method counts differently, when they bother to count at all. Logically you think a visit would have had to view at least the primary landing page. Could one possibly be weeding out traffic from Web crawlers indexing your site? Maybe. Could they simply be ignoring any traffic from sources where the browser could not be identified? Possibly.
One thing is pretty certain, when it comes to statistics people always choose the one which makes them look better.
Just remember the marketing mantra:
You can prove anything you want with statistics. Just change the sample assumption and be selective in how/where you sample.