Comments on: How bots mess up clickthrough stats and can be used for evil

By: Joe Porter

Joe Porter — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:30:17 +0000

Glad I could show you what not to do lol. Like I said before it a has a great interface for quickly getting the stats. Always been a fan though of using multiple stat tracking for comparison. Look forward to what you came up with.

By: Richard Orelup

Richard Orelup — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:42:22 +0000

Just went and did a review of what w3counter is all about and not really a fan of it. Did some tests and it’s easy to game in a bad way. Though luckily it showed me something to look out for when working on my own stuff.

By: Richard Orelup

Richard Orelup — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:50:11 +0000

Wasn’t really much in the way of research as it was quite obvious where the numbers were coming from to anyone who has significant experience on the development side of the web. Just did a couple checks to make sure it was right before asking for clarification.

Someone mentioned to me how many hits the counter had for the NWITweetup article and wondered if that was correct. I said no it most likely wasn’t and the person mentioned how it had a TON of RT’s. That is why I started to wonder about why those ever happened. The numbers point towards someone using one of the many bot networks on twitter. Does that mean VL did it, no? It very well could have been someone else playing with it to see what could be done. But that doesn’t change that they do gain by having their hits inflated.

We will have to talk more about the traffic others are seeing cause again, I don’t have those numbers to really comment about them. See you all at the event.

By: daltonsbriefs

daltonsbriefs — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:58:35 +0000

First off I don’t believe for a second that VL would want to deceive their advertisers, as I work with a few of these advertisers and they are very pleased with actual traffic from the site. Perhaps this kind of tracking is more important when a publisher is selling page view related ad pricing?

You mastery of the details behind the scenes far exceeds mine, no argument there.

But I do wonder what started this research project, I obviously missed a conversation in the last couple days about traffic counts?

By: Tweets that mention How bots mess up clickthrough stats and can be used for evil « The Blog of Mu – Web Development blog for Mu Studios -- Topsy.com

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:59:46 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Joe Porter. Joe Porter said: RT @ripsup: Okay all so here is my post on how bots can be used to boost traffic. http://ow.ly/250vL @ValpoLife @wadeshull #nwindiana [...]

By: Joe Porter

Joe Porter — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:56:19 +0000

So what would your thoughts about W3Counter Stats http://www.w3counter.com/ be. They use the javascript format and trigger. So they would fall into “more accurate” stats category?

Nice break down and explanation.