Comments on: Google Analytics v. Urchin 5: A Metrics Quandary

By: walt

walt — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:43:44 +0000

Update: I’ve fixed all HTML errors in the primary templates (about 1/4 of them from other people’s code, 3/4 of them “errors” in capitalization from my own code). That is to say, the W3C validator now validates walt.lishost.org itself, as of 10 minutes ago, as valid HTML 1.0 Transitional.

There are probably still loads of HTML errors in individual posts going back beyond the first page, most of them more “errors” than errors. We’ll see what this does to the GA numbers. It would take bloody forever to go through all the archives, cleaning up each post’s “errors.” And, of course, log analysis doesn’t require such fussiness.

By: laura

laura — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:42:59 +0000

Very interesting. I’ve used GA for our library website for its entire existence, and while I’ve noticed huge discrepancies between its numbers and those from the webhost statistics programs, I’ve stuck with GA in order to keep the data source consistent. I just decided to check the site’s markup again, though, and it is rife with errors due to some changes I made awhile back — although our hit counts in GA continue to go up, slowly but steadily.

By: walt

walt — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:07:31 +0000

Seth: That’s really interesting–particularly given that I made wholly trivial modifications to the template I’m using. As time permits, I’ll run the validator again and see whether it’s plausible to fix things.

Of course, a broader question is whether I should need to: I’ve heard few complaints of people being unable to read the blog, and lots of other people use the same template. A stats package that requires 100% pure adherence to a notoriously forgiving code scheme is biased toward failure…not inherently a good thing.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:06:41 +0000

“that GA is apparently intolerant of less-than-perfect HTML”

I think this is your problem. I ran the front page through the W3C HTML validator (validator.w3.org) , and it complained extensively.

97 Errors, 5 warning(s)

Most of the errors are trivial, e.g. uppercase where the spec indicates lowercase. But there look to be some significant problems with various tags not being properly nested and closed. I suspect the GA code is not being parsed in many cases.