I have been spending the past few hours going through my logs and web traffic statistics. In all honesty, I am more than just confused. There is a large discrepancy between my Web statistics, and my advertising statistics.

Let me explain:

I will use this month of October as an example. It is poignant because it is only the third day of October. According to my Web statistics, I have had 421 visits this month. Granted, I realize many of these are spammer hits. Therefore, what I have been looking at are the visits that have lasted between 30 seconds and 30 minutes. My assumption was that these were people that were actually reading the blog. If I use this number of 127 people it shows a good readership. However, when I look at my advertising statistics, such as Adsense, they tell me I have only had two hits this month. This coincides with the number of hits that is recorded from Crazy Egg.    Crazy Egg is a another type of Web statistics site that gives graphic representations of where people are clicking.

On its face, I thought this was bad news. Because obviously my Web statistics did not reflect the actual people that are reading my blog. Then I looked at another angle. If I used in my statistics, only the people that showed up in my advertising statistics, to be honest, my ad revenue per viewer is very high.

So, how do I reconcile the visit and the appearance of high-traffic, with the low number of actual ad views. Honestly at this point I do not have a clue. If you are experiencing the same problem, or if you know someone who has the answer to this question, please contact me.

Because I do not fully understand why there is such a difference, I have decided to only report my ad view hits. So, from this point on I will not use my regular Web statistics, but instead will report the number of ad views my blog has seen in each time period.

As I alluded to earlier, if I were to look for the silver lining in this cloud, I would say that I have a very high click percentage ratio. I simply need to get more real people to view the blog.

This is the reason that I used captcha to throttle on the amount of spam that I was getting on this site. That part of my plan seems to be doing well.

At this point, as my blog grows, I believe I will start using my ad views as a true test of how many people are reading the blog, as opposed to my Web statistics hits. Even if this is not a true picture of it, it would be the most conservative estimate. As I prefer to be conservative, I would certainly feel more comfortable using that statistic.

By the end of the week I will get those new statistics to you.