A Blogger’s Worst Nightmare
14 June, 2007 - Blogging - 15 Comments
Jane May wrote a good post about maximising your daily efficiency, and one of the points she made was you should only check your Web site stats twice a day.
Well, sorry Jane. I haven’t quite managed that yet. Generally, I check my Analytics, FeedBurner, Adsense and Amazon Associates stats four or five times a day. So, what a horrible moment it would be if I were to realise I had made a rookie error which had stopped my stats from being collected, right? Some would even go as far as to say a day of lost stats is a blogger’s worst nightmare. That isn’t all that crazy a statement to make, because bloggers rely heavily on their stats to allow them to modify their blog to provide a more useful experience for their readers, as well as increase their profit margins.
I did make a rookie error
I did make a rookie error. In my haste to get this blog launched, I completely forgot to insert the Google Analytics code. While I spent last night and all this morning shouting loud expletives at Google for not updating the stats, I realised a few minutes ago that it was in fact my error.
With that, I now have zero Analytics stats for launch day as well as half of today. 
It looks like I’ll have to rely on Awstats and the basic stats from Feedburner for that 36 hour period. Now I really do wish I had paid a little extra to get the advanced stats package with Feedburner. If anybody uses it, I would love to hear your thoughts.
Shout at Google
With all that said, I still feel I have the right to shout at Google. In the last 36 hours I have logged in to my Analytics account ten times to see if the stats had updated (I wasn’t aware it was my mistake until just a few minutes ago). That’s ten opportunities that Google had to tell me the code wasn’t on my site. It already has this feature built in, but it seems you have to manually press the “Check Status” button for it to work. Wouldn’t it make sense for Google to automatically check the tracking status every hour? If it had, I could have lost just one hour of stats, rather than 36 hours!
It can’t only be me who makes these silly mistakes. What rookie errors have you made?
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Posted on 14 June, 2007 by Jamie Harrop
Filed Under Blogging |
15 Comments»
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I once launched a site without checking it in IE.
And on stats, I once upgraded my wordpress install, which killed the link with my Mint stats - thus no stats. It was only 2 months after that I got my stats back in order….
Two months? Wow. I thought my 36 hours was bad.
heh, I once published an important financial report into one of the leading UK furniture retailers a day early. I thought it was Thursday, but no, it was Wednesday. D’oh!
Haha. I take it that was back when you were employed by a boss. Did ya get a big clip around the ear?
So Jamie - where’s the Vlog?
I just finished recording it a few seconds ago.
It should be up this evening.
(can’t wait!)
Clip round the ear? Something like that!
I’m only a day old with Adsense and still anal, checking about 3x a day, so far so good. I like your site layout, easy on the eyes!
Thanks Da Guru.
Jane May will be writing a review about the site on her blog soon, so the real test of how well the site works should come then.
Like the design, look forward to see how you develop.
But you need to get your title tags sorted, there is no point in your name being in the title tag, you will rank for that with no sweat.
There is a great wordpress hack going round that sticks the title of your blog post in the title tag.
Plus, I can see this site is primed for a nice bit of linkbait.
Thanks Cornwall.
Yup, I need to get those title tags changed. I’ll try to find the plugin later today.
I like this! Checking stats can definitely add up to a lot of wasted time each day…
It certainly can! I’ve checked my starts just four times in the last 48 hours. I’ve wanted to check them more often than that, but I’ve bitten my tongue and held out. That, combined with less forum activity (as well as not signing in to MSN!) meant I got lots of work done.
[...] the middle of June when I launched my own blog, I wrote about a blogger’s worst nightmare. Today, I’m going to write about a blogger’s worst [...]