Traffic stats analysis and 404 error help requested

[David G]

Originally posted by ToastyX Well, before blaming the seller (for lower traffic than expected), make sure you are tracking visitors correctly. Make sure you are tracking EVERYTHING, including subdomains and subdirectories, so if people visit http://asdf.ghjkl.example.com/qwerty/uiop.html, it should count them. Also make sure the domain works with and without the www. If you are using a service such as DomainSponsor, keep in mind they don't count some foreign traffic. I don't know how you have it setup, but those are the most common mistakes.

Hi Toasty and others, I posted this here in a separate thread as it's not really too relevant to the other one and his complaint, but your reply is.

Would an .htaccess file with this code 'ErrorDocument 404 / ' result in recording all hits to all sub-pages which do not exist on the server (i.e. old pages or htm pages from a prior site)?

I have that .htaccess installed on a site to capture 404 errors and it does seem to work well (i.e. if I type-in a random htm page it goes to the html index page) but the odd thing is my Weblizer shows good traffic and lots of unque sites (not sure what unique sites are?) but my MS FastCounter on the site only has on avg about 30/hits (not even uniques) a day, far below the 611 avg visits reported by Weblizer. Yes, the FastCounter works as it should, which I have tested many times. Yes, the site works with and without the www.

Can Toasty or anyone else explain why this huge discrepancy? Thanks for your help. Below is my weblizer stats:

Monthly Statistics for November 2003

Total Hits 14086
Total Files 13770
Total Pages 12926
Total Visits 12841
Total KBytes 82032

Total Unique Sites 12414
Total Unique URLs 5
Total Unique Referrers 23
Total Unique User Agents 130

. Avg Max

Hits per Hour 27 65
Hits per Day 670 892
Files per Day 655 864
Pages per Day 615 789
Visits per Day 611 788