Discrepancy between my ClickCounter and target AWstats

[MarkHoward]

I have a website with advertising panels each fed through phpClickCounter.

I have been using this for 4 months and have discovered that ClickCounter is counting about 3 times as many clicks as the target sites' cPanel>AWStats is recording.

Can anyone suggest how this might be happening?

Which is more likely to be correct?

[Daniel0]

I believe AwStats disregards know search engine crawlers, so that might be the reason.

[MarkHoward]

Hi Daniel

Why would AWStats think that a click-through from my site was a web-crawler?

If it DOES for some reason think that for some clicks from my site, why not all of them?

I didn't make it clear that I was referring to AWStats "referrer" figures from my specific site.

[Daniel0]

Well, if there is a link, then it might follow it unless you use something like rel="nofollow".

[MarkHoward]

I'm sorry, I not experienced at this.

My website has a link to an advertiser's site.

When a user on my site clicks on the link the click gets directed through a ClickCounter on my site and thence onto the advertiser's site.  Each click increments a counter on my site's ClickCounter.

After a month, my clickcounter has recorded a total of, say, 30 clicks on that link.

Now

On the advertiser's site he looks at cPanels' AWStats to see how many referrals he's had from my website's address at the end of the month and AWStats says there has been only 10.

 

Not sure where "rel=no follow" comes into the above.

[JonnoTheDev]

On the advertiser's site he looks at cPanels' AWStats

Do not take AWSTATS figures as gospel. As Daniel stated there are all kinds of crawlers that can follow links. They may not always initiate your counter script, and weblog stats applications are each configured differently in the way they log traffic.

 

OK, you say you have a counter that has 30 clicks and the target user has 10 logs of your website as a referer. Well lets say that 21 of those are a referer from the same search engine and only 9 are true human users, then the stats program may only log unique referers by IP, user-agent, etc so a total of 10 is displayed.

 

Reading web server log files through stats programs like AWStats or Webalizer is about looking for trends to give you a rough idea of where your traffic comes from and the number of unique visitors you are getting. As I have said, each installation can be tweeked to ignore traffic from all kinds of sources, and display data differently.

[MarkHoward]

OK, you say you have a counter that has 30 clicks and the target user has 10 logs of your website as a referer. Well lets say that 21 of those are a referer from the same search engine and only 9 are true human users, then the stats program may only log unique referers by IP, user-agent, etc so a total of 10 is displayed.

I didn't realise that a webcrawler could initiate a click-through on my site. 

If it does that, will the target site read the referrer as my site or the crawler site?

So, could an explanation then be:

Crawler does a click-through; my clickcounter logs it; target site logs it as comming from the webcrawler site, rather than from my site.  This would result in my site recording a click (even though it's not human) and the target site ignoring it as a click-through from my site (reading it as coming from the crawler site)?

Is that feasible?

[JonnoTheDev]

Its possible that a crawler / spider could record a click on your site, follow the link, see that it is a 301 redirect and then decide to terminate itself before landing on the target website. They all work differently, they may not always follow right through to the target site.

Really, you should identify bots / spiders / crawlers on your website an not record their action. A simple start as daniel has stated is to add a nofollow parameter to the link i.e

<a href="link.php" rel="noindex,nofollow">Link Text</a>

This should cause search engines to ignore the link

[MarkHoward]

Oh, good, thanks Neil.

That's a good start.  If I do that, it will take the possibility of non-human clicks out of my end.

Thanks for showing us the syntax.

I'll do that tomorrow - bed-time now.