You would be surprised with the amount of bloggers and webmasters out there who believe that their sites get way more traffic than what they really do. And I am not pointing fingers here, as I have been there myself.

The reason for this is probably connected with the popularity of cPanel hosting, as the two web analytics programs that come with cPanel, AWStats and Webalizer, grossly overestimate traffic levels. Beginners often use one of these to get the stats for their sites, and they end up believing in a fairy tale of visitors and page views.

Around two years ago I was doing the same mistake. By that time this blog was probably getting some 100,000 page views monthly, but Webalizer was reporting 350,000 page views or so…. Needless to say that I wanted to believe in the latter number, but after a while a realized that it couldn’t be right.

Take a look at the traffic levels that Webalizer reported for this blog in August:

If you sum that up you will get 1,081,959 page views. I wish that was true! The real number is closer to a third of that.

So why is it important to get real about traffic levels? For several reasons. First of all it is the only way to know the popularity of your site and to compare it with the competition. Secondly, it is essential to know the real numbers when you are trying to monetize the site. Imagine selling banner ads on your site and claiming that you get 300,000 monthly page views when in reality you get 50,000…. Advertisers would get pissed and you would also hurt your credibility.

At this point you might be asking: “OK, you convinced me, but how do I get the real traffic numbers for my site?”

In my opinion that are just two ways to get the real traffic levels on your website. The first one is by using Google Analytics, which is the analytics software that most accurately interprets traffic data (it is free also). The second way would be to run third party ads on your site, like Google AdSense or ads from a CPM network. When there is money involved you can bet that people will track the numbers as accurately as possible.

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