Views by country: European Union?
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You have recently introduced the category European Union in ‘Views by country’. How is it that I am suddenly getting more views from European countries than ever before, that is, since you introduced this category? It says on one day that there are 146 views from the ‘European Union’ whereas before this I might get 14 from the UK and one from Italy. Secondly, how is it that it says I had 146 views from the EU as well as 2 from France? France is in the EU! This is vague as well as confusing. I suppose you can’t get rid of this category? But can you at least fix it so it doesn’t give wrong information, which it clearly seems to be doing? Please clarify. Thank you.
DavidThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hey David!
The new European Union stat refers to visitors that our geolocation provider “sees” as being in the European Union but cannot be tracked to a specific country.
WordPress.com users can now choose EU as a location — this wasn’t an option before — that is why you’re suddenly seeing their appearance in your stats.
I hope this helps! If you have any other concerns, drop me a note. Thanks much!
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Thank your reply! However, main concern still remains. Before the introduction of this category (EU) I was getting, for example, 200 views from Tanzania a day and between 2 to 20 views from different European countries. The vast majority of views had always been from Tanzania. Immediately you introduced the EU category the stats changed – for example yesterday there were 119 views from Tanzania and 129 from EU. This kind of imbalance had never happened before! It either suggests that before introduction of the EU category, your geolocation provider attributed countries it could not identify to Tanzania, or the geolocation system is wrong in attributing so many views to the EU. It has to be one of these two scenarios. My stats can’t change from about 10 views per day from individual European countries to 120 per day exactly from the time you introduced the new EU category! Could you please explain this phenomenon?
Many thanks,
David -
Hi David,
Every time a stat is created it’s because a reader views your site, and the site asks their browser for information. One of those pieces of information is their IP address. That IP address is then queried against a database that matches IP address to locations. In our stats we then show the country results from that query.
There’s not a way to change how this functions on each specific site’s stats.
Would you let me know the primary Internet Service Providers in Tanzania? It’s possible they handle IP addresses in a way that our geolocation service isn’t accounting for.
Best,
-Alex G.
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Thank you Alex! Probably getting to the root of the problem – though I am not technical at all.
I have no idea who the primary ISPs are in Tanzania but these are the best links I could find that identify the most common.
http://www.zoomtanzania.com/Internet-Service-Providers
http://www.tix.or.tz/tispa/members.html
http://www.tanzanian-tanzania.com/internet-service-providers-tanzanian-tanzania.htmlMy website is in Swahili although there is an English section. Just to highlight the anomaly, yesterday I had 145 views from the EU and 103 from Tanzania. This is most likely quite wrong, since before the introduction of the EU category it would have been something like 228 from Tanzania and maybe 20 from individual European countries. This huge shift coincided with the day the EU category was introduced. Probably nothing can be done about this? I am now just adding the bulk of the EU views to the Tanzanian views to get a better picture. I don’t suppose one can DISABLE this EU category? Or is there a different pug-in/software I can switch to get these statistics? Many thanks for reply any efforts to clarify this anomaly but I can appreciate there might not be an easy solution to this.
Warm regard and thanks,
David -
Hi David,
Thank you for these links. I’ll report this to the team that works on our geolocation feature, but like I mentioned before, there may be more at play here that’s yielding these results. If there’s new information as we look into it, I’ll let you know.
Blogs with the WordPress.com Business plan can setup Google Analytics along with our stats, but those are the only options for stats available with our hosting.
If you prefer to move your blog to a self-hosted environment running the free software from WordPress.org there are many stats plugins to choose from. If that’s a route you’d prefer to go, let me know and I’m happy to help point you to information about transferring your blog.
Best,
-Alex G.
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