Lookery.com

What Lookery is doing starts with a cookie, and it isn’t anything new. The one thing we have made sure to let everyone know is that we only collect anonymous data. Never will we be collecting your name, address, phone number, or other information that links you to the data personally.

With our recent release of the data that is available for your site, many of you out there are already comparing statistics to such services as Google Analytics. There will always be a difference between two services, but to explain how we do things, it’s really no different than what is arguably the biggest or one of the biggest data companies.

According to this article excerpt, an interview that was conducted with Google Analytics Brett Crosby, the variables that can occur with the Lookery tracking code are the same as what could happen with Google’s tracking code:

Eric Enge: I suppose the simple solution is if you put the tag at the bottom of the page and a user clicks on a link before the page fully loads.

Brett Crosby: Yeah that’s one but, the best practice is to put the tracking Javascript at the bottom of the page. While you might miss some users in your analytics it’s better to have that than have your page fail to load in the extremely rare event that your analytics server has a slowdown.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. So what does Google Analytics do with users who reject cookies?

Brett Crosby: They are not going to be counted as traffic.

Eric Enge: What about with Java script?

Brett Crosby: Same thing.

That explains why there are times you will see one count on Google Analytics and you will see another count on Lookery. There really is no fool proof way to have two services count exactly the same.

Another item that people have issues distinguishing is what is a unique visitor versus a returning visitor. Again citing Google as our source, a unique is defined as:

Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.

Keep in mind, our tracking for sites that are running ads could be totally different, as now we are are discussing ad impressions and not actual site visits! If you have 2 ads on a page, and as cited above by Brett Crosby about page loads, your ad impressions can vary. We track a few sites religiously to watch our differences, and there is a definite difference in the way a top banner will out load a bottom banner.

The nice thing (just like Google) you receive all this data we have for free when you run the Lookery cookie (JS tracker code) on your site. This data we are showing isn’t guessing, it’s all based on real data that all started with a simple cookie.

If you are interested in learning more about Lookery, sign up for an account and give us a try. We also have a very active support site where you can even ask more technical questions and actually receive an answer from a real person who cares about what you think.