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Issues with my Forum - Advice please

by Thunder123
5 replies
Hi guys,
I have a health forum that supports a well known product that is available throughout all major supermarkets/pharmacies and is advertised on TV daily. My IM team have presented me with stats that I just cant believe. They are saying that we are getting an average of 1400 unique visitors per month (using Google Analytics). The site is a bit over 3 years old and going by the Wordpress dashboard it has about 70,000 posts/comments (which is way down on what I thought we would have). Google has around 12000 indexed.
The reason I am questioning this is because a number of years ago I had a forum on the same topic, with no product branding and not TV advertising and it was getting around over 2000 uniques per day. I have concerns that either the site is not structured properly or that the Analytics is not picking up all the pages. It is not my company and the team employed to look after this are more project managers than online marketers. Ive tried discussing it with them but they just keep saying "These are the figures they must be right".

These figures don't sound right do they?
Any opinions or advice is greatly appreciated
#advice #forum #issues
  • Profile picture of the author Myles Sinclair
    I don't think anyone can tell you if the figures are accurate or not based on the results of a previous site.

    You could install different analytics software/plugin and compare the results. That will give you a quick indication as to accuracy. Also check out the stats in your cPanel and see how those figures compare.
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    • Profile picture of the author inboxtrail
      You could put a tracker on your website, there is google analytics and a bunch of others as well.

      Quick List I use:

      Google Analytics Official Website â€" Web Analytics & Reporting
      StatCounter - Free Invisible Web Tracker, Hit Counter and Web Stats
      eXTReMe Tracking - Free Tracker
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      • Profile picture of the author Thunder123
        Thanks guys.
        Myles, the only reason I have compared was because one site had no budget and no real profile, and the newer one has a major TV spend and brand awareness. I built the first one so it would be great for my ego to say that I was just better at it than these guys but I do think the numbers are wrong.
        Inboxtrail, we are using Google Analytics but I don't have access to the account and I feel the figures are either being misinterpreted or the Analytics aren't picking up all the pages
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        • Profile picture of the author Myles Sinclair
          You may well be right, and the figures you are getting are wrong.

          The company should be able to set up access to the analytics for you. I did it for a client a couple of years ago. I can't remember off hand how I did it, but it enables third parties to login to their analytics without being able to see anyone elses stats. At the time I just googled how to give access to clients for analytics for their domains on my account, and followed the instuctions. It was very easy to do as I recall.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sagar Mehta
    Your old forum is not a good way to estimate traffic on the new one. All variables are different now.

    If you are using cPanel, you may want to ask your host if you have AWStats. This is basically a stats software installed right on the server and records the most accurate data.

    See if you can compare the data from AWStats with what you have from GA, and that should possibly bring out some inconsistencies that you can then look into.

    Sagar
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