Project Wonderful

[Gibson]

Um...how reliable is the PW stats tracking?

Not even remotely reliable. Only rely on them to be wrong. Even applying Rob's Chaos Theory on stats, they're wrong-ass wrong.

[Rob]

The fact that you can get fairly different numbers for displays, for two different ads that are on the same page should tell you there is something fishy going on with those numbers. I use them as a guide only... and as I've said before... no numbers are truly accurate. They are always just a guide.  :-\

[Miluette]

PW started changing a bunch of stuff I had hoped it would change for a very, very long time, but I haven't actually used it to advertise in months so I have no idea how those changes affect my usage of the site yet. And there are still other things that bug me functionality- and presentation-wise. I guess it's because it's essentially not simple, but trying to be.

[Nuke]

Um...how reliable is the PW stats tracking? I just started advertising a little under two weeks ago, and according to their chart yesterday's traffic was nearly 5,000 uniques above when I started (a 1,000% increase). It's weird because I added up the clicks from all my ads and it totalled to under 500  ???

Someone posted a link to a traffic analyser a while ago, but I can't find it now. I need to double check this. Something's either Very Wrong or Very, Very Right.

When I'm not advertising, PW displays my stats at reliably about 150% of my Analytics stats.

When I am advertising, though, it displays my unique visitors at over 600% of what my actual traffic was according to my other metrics. It's my hypothesis that PW vastly inflates your unique hits from referring sites in order to give you positive feedback from making bids. The reason I think it's inaccurate when I'm not advertising, then, is because I get hits from bookmarks on Belfry and WebcomicList and so forth.

Um, also, don't forget that even the most accurate metrics are still voodoo. I like analytics the most because it displays time on site and pages visited so you have a firmer idea of who's a robot and who isn't. Don't forget you're not seeing people with adblock and noscript, either.

[JGray]

You've had some nice growth, too, Nuke.

[JR]

You've had some nice growth, too, Nuke.

This sounds preverted.

[JGray]

Bah. In skilled hands, anything sounds perverted.