A quick lesson for “Sigaw ng Bayan” on web stats

Manolo points out the claim of Sigaw ng Bayan (www.sigawngbayan.com) representative Raul Lambino (People’s Initiative) that their site got 9 million hits in the first 3 weeks that it was up (yes, a 3-week old website!). A screenshot of their website 3 days ago showed a “bandwidth exceeded” notice.

Dean Jorge Bocobo follows it up with a deeper scrutiny of the site’s profile on the net and its exposure on the search engines. The Village Idiot Savant got a good laugh and even wrote Inq7.net to humor Ms. Belinda Cunanan who originally mentioned about the stats in her column.

It got me laughing real hard actually. This Lambino guy must not know what he is talking about, telling a flat lie or he was just being fooled by their webmaster.

Here’s a quick review of some web analytics concepts:

pageviews – a request for a file whose type is defined as a page (usually in html, php, asp, cfm, pl or even txt or pdf)

visit – requests from the same uniquely identified client (usually defined by IP address with session or time). Sometimes, if there’s no time-limit, a pageview can be considered a visit in itself.

hit – a request for a file from the web server (any type of file or data including images, css, html, mp3, txt, etc.).

Visits can be time-bound. Meaning, if the time limit (session timeout) for a visit is 60 minutes, the same visitor can be counted as many as 24 times on a single day. This figure can geometrically increase for a single unique visitor if the time limit is lowered. So, reducing the session time out to 15 minutes instead of 60, can quadruple the visitor count even if in reality, only a single person browsed the site on a 24-hour period (that brings the count to 96 visits). And I don’t even think it doing just that for their website anyway.

A single visit can generate one to any number of pageviews. A single pageview can constitute a single to any number of hits.

If you look closely and dissect their website’s homepage, you’ll end up with the same count as mine:

– 1 header image
– 3o button images (most of the buttons are counted as 2 since you have on-hover and off-hover images)
– 3 picture images on the stories
– 1 html page

That’s a total of 35 objects on a single page. So, if you view that page, it will generate 35 hits (34 for the images and 1 for the page itself). If you refresh your browser, a second later, that’s another 35 hits. Do that a hundred times and you get 3,500 hits in less than 10 minutes.

Ok, let’s just say that the visitor count of 371,414 is accurate or true and their counter has no limitations, then that number is also equivalent to their pageviews.

Now, we can compute their total hits since April 8, which is basically (371,414 pageviews) x (35/pageview) and we end up with 12,999,490. So the 9 million hits that they claimed a couple of days ago might just be true.

Manolo’s blog got 208,343 pageviews last month. If his blog has the same number of images/page as Sigaw ng Bayan, he would have had 7.3 million hits. Close match, considering Manolo doesn’t keep on hitting the F5 button every minute.

Ooops! I must have added 70 more hits from my last 2 visits on their site.

[tags]metrics, stats, analytics[/tags]