Artificially Inflating Visitor Stats

  • 25 September 2010
  • 5 replies
  • 2 views
vlbeta

Unbounce is artificially inflating visitor stats, throwing off both billing and conversion rate calculation.

Screenshots of actual + unbounce: http://db.tt/MZM4EVo

5 replies

Carl_Schmidt1

Hi Vitaliy,

There are a couple reasons there can be a discrepancy, although I certainly wouldn’t expect one that large.

We use log-based analysis instead of script-based analysis. This means we have to work extra hard to filter out simple robots (which we do), however, from time-to-time, one does slip through. For example, we just had another customer report that creating Facebook ads resulted in additional visitors/views to their page, and on inspection, discovered that a Facebook robot does indeed visit the page, however, it doesn’t identify itself the way many robots do. We’ll be fixing that up shortly.

I’ll dig into this, and am happy to provide the access logs to demonstrate how we’ve computed the statistics. I’ll go on the record right now as stating that we are absolutely not intentionally inflating visitor stats. Not only would that be dishonest, it would also be spectacularly difficult to do given that many of our customers do use third-party analytics.

Sorry you’re feeling angry over this, and hoping we can get it cleared up right away…

Regards,

  • Carl
J

Hello Vitalit - Thank you for your post.

I want to reassure you that we do not artificially inflate traffic stats.

All of our stats come directly from our logs and we do our best to make sure they are as accurate as possible.

We have encountered a bug with one or two of our customers that causes an incorrect overall traffic count for their current billng period to be displayed if they have performed a certain series of actions with their account, but it is unclear that this is causing the problem in your case.

It is also true that different tracking tools use different methods for tracking visitors and there will always be discrepancies if you compare two together.

Having said that, we take this issue very seriously and understand why you would be angry about it: We will investigate the situation and let you know what we discover.

Jason Murphy
Co-Founder and COO
Unbounce

J

…and in my haste to respond I miss-spelled your name. Very sorry Vitaliy.

Carl_Schmidt1

Hi Vitaliy,

We just released an update to our stats engine that filters more thoroughly for robots. After analyzing our logs, we noticed a few robots that were not being identified based solely on the “user agent” (including on your page), so we’ve now added filtering by ip address range as well.

I’m very sorry for any concern this has caused. Please do let us know if you continue to see reporting discrepancies.

Kind regards,
Carl

J

Hi Everyone!

Just a quick update that yesterday we deployed IP Filtering as a feature in the app! Feel free to review the following Unbounce Answers article to learn about the full functionality of this feature (filters for visits, views, and conversions) and how to use it with your Unbounce account:

http://support.unbounce.com/entries/2…

You’ll now be able to manage the IPs to filter for your account right from the app.

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