A quick post about stats

I came across something recently that has me puzzled. It has to do with stats, something I don’t look at too often.

This next image is a screen capture from today’s Jetpack Stats. It’s the numbers for the last seven days and the weekly numbers,

I want to draw attention to the 7-day highlights. No, it’s not the fact it shows a drop in the numbers. Before I go on, here’s the screenshot of the visitors broken down by country . . .

I bring this up because Google Analytics recently began sending me reports about this site. I’d set it up a long time ago, and I’d forgotten about it, but they just changed the way they report the numbers and wanted to entice me into buying services from them.

I won’t, but the reports have me puzzled . . .

They are showing roughly the same number of daily users, but look at the stats for where those users come from . . .

Do you notice a discrepancy in the reports? Specifically, the numbers from China?

By the way, you can click on the images for larger views.

Anyway, it’s showing almost as many viewers from China as I get in the US. In the past weeks, it’s occasionally been very close, with as many users from China as I get from the US, but the Jetpack numbers don’t reflect that. In fact, they’re nowhere close.

Mind you, perhaps I’m not reading these charts correctly, but they seem fairly straightforward (as is the help sections explaining what I’m looking at). Also, that chart is for the past 4 weeks, but if I look at the monthly for Jetpack, I don’t see anything like those numbers for China. Canada is also off, showing more in Jetpack than in Analytics.

I suppose I could ask WP Support to explain to me what I’m looking at but — frankly — I trust Jetpack far less than Google Analytics. I say that although I seem to remember something about Google Analytics being tied to Jetpack, but it could be dementia kicking in.

It also helps that Analytics confirms some things I had already figured out about my so-called subscribers and visitors . . .

If you open that plot, you’ll notice that my Firefly post about Serenity’s plans still draws more visitors than any current post, and by not a small margin, either.

The daily average of visitors is a tad higher than I thought, but not much.

What’s interesting is the engagement, which is shown a bit better here:

I may get lots of visits, but if you look at the engagement averages, four users account for the majority of the engagement sessions and times. The rest are doing a good imitation of the Griswolds at the Grand Canyon.

There’s one positive thing I saw; more than two-thirds of visitors are on a PC. That means that there’s at least a chance the majority of visitors are seeing my pictures on a large enough screen to do them some justice . . . unless people are on laptops. Still, even so, the majority of users are on devices with high screen resolution.

But that bit about where the visitors are coming from has me a bit confused.

Mind you, there are a lot of people in China, so it makes sense there’s a good chance they should be represented in large numbers . . . but that’s not true of India (only 9 visitors versus 214 for China). India also has a significant number of people, but they’re obviously less interested in my blog than the Chinese.

I’m not going to lose any sleep over it because, as I said, I rarely look at stats, and I already know that there’s only a handful of people who regularly engage with the blog . . . literally. The majority of visitors barely look at the photos, and they certainly don’t read anything.

. . . and that’s OK.

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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