Revisitors Member Dashboard

By far, our most frequently asked question is "Why doesn't my website's tracking software match Revisitors' counter?"

There are many reasons your tracking software may not match our counter. I have put together this page to explain why it's happening, as well as to offer suggestions on how to correctly track your campaign’s visitors using a third-party counter. I hope this helps you to understand how our redirection process works and better interpret your stats.

How our redirection
process works

In order to understand why your counter may not track our visitors properly, you need to understand how our traffic redirection process works.

Basically, our traffic comes from a large network of specialized websites that receive thousands of visitors every day. We gain our visitors using generic ads (pop-up, pop-under, banner, expired domain, FFA link, etc...), and using a proprietary algorithm, deliver them to our customers' websites via our main traffic server.

The redirection process consists of three separate steps:

A visitor visits one of the sites in our advertising network
(our network includes thousands of different sites).
The website of a Revisitors customer may be displayed to visitors as a pop-up, pop-under, via an in-line frame, or directly in a visitor's web browser.
The input of this visit is sent back to our traffic server (instantly) and to the website third party counter (if any).

Revisitors internal
tracker

In order to count the visitors we redirect to our customers' websites, we developed an internal counter that resides on the same traffic server that handles your campaign. We designed it this way to minimize the delay between the time your website is shown in our advertising network and the time that the visit is counted.

Every time your site is shown via our network, our internal counter tracks it, and counts it as a visit. Thanks to this system, our counter never advances unless your site is visited through the server. In other words, the hit count is incremented at the same exact time a visitor is sent to your site.

To make sure that our internal counter only tracks visits being redirected from our advertising network, we assign each campaign a unique URL that is strictly connected to the counter.

Third party stats, why they may
not work properly with our traffic

There are an enormous numbers of counters and web analytics packages currently available. Each one works in a slightly different way from the other. Thus, there may be many reasons why a specific analytics package doesn’t count our traffic properly. Here’s a list of the most common issues that we’ve experienced using third party counters with our traffic.

Missing traffic in the redirection process (tracker cannot keep up, visitors close their browser window, your site is intercepted by a pop-up blocker, etc…)
Separate server tracking (tracking script is not hosted locally)
Load time (tracker will not count a visit unless a visitor has remained on the site for x number of seconds)
Filters (repeat visits from the same referrer URL are discarded)
Lack of real-time updates
Tracker downtime
As well as many other similar issues...

Revisitors internal
tracker

We have noticed that one of the most popular counters, StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) works pretty well with our traffic. Given all the limits specified above (especially #1 and #2), we found that the percentage of traffic counted by this third party counter is pretty high and can reach up to and even exceed 70% of what is shown by our counter.

Please note that even StatCounter will not show 100% of our traffic compared to our internal statistics. This is generally a result of some visitors being lost in cyberspace during the redirection process between the advertising network and your website. That being said, it is important to understand that even if a visitor is not counted, it has been successfully redirected to your website.

Another method I recommend to track your campaign’s visits by consulting your website host RAW SERVER LOGS. These logs will track almost all of our traffic since they don’t have any third party code installed that has to report the visitor to the third-party server, and don’t have any load time or filter restrictions when configured properly (see #1, #2 and #3 above).

If you see a discrepancy between our counter and yours, make sure you understand why this may have happened. I recommend that you try to use a counter that works with our traffic (we recommend StatCounter).

We understand that many of our customers may be surprised that 100% our traffic does not show up in their tracking data. We have absolutely no interest in counting visitors who were not redirected to your website. There is no incentive for us to engage in such practices as the majority of customers independently verify their campaign’s visits. I hope that the explanations provided on this page will help our customers understand why this occurs. Please feel free to send us a note if you have any additional questions or concerns.

We understand that many of our customers may be surprised by our traffic not showing up 100% in their stats and we feel bad about this. We have absolutely no interest in counting visitors who were not redirected. Furthermore, even if we were so inclined, there is no incentive to engage in such practices as the majority of customers independently verify our stats. I hope that the explanations provided in this page will help our customers understand why this is happening and trust our service. Best Regards,

CEO - Revisitors.com

Revisitors.com | 101 California St, Suite 2450 - San Francisco, CA 94111, USA