Firefox Extensions Can Alter Your Web Traffic Reporting

I start this post assuming that you have analytics in place on your website, the single most important thing for tracking your traffic. I highly recommend Google Analytics – free and powerful.

It is common knowledge that no two analytics programs will have the exact same numbers, but there is one thing they will agree on – they will undercount the number of visitors to your site using Firefox.

A significant portion of Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls that the user doesn’t approve of. Blocking javascript causes Urchin, Google Analytics, Webtrends, etc to not work. These tracking services never see the traffic because NoScipt blocks it.

The best way to figure out the real traffic to your site is to also look at your own weblogs on your server. Most hosting packages should come with a weblog analytics tool at no extra charge. The hosting company I have used since 2001 provides access to our internal stats and we routinely compare to Google Analytics.

If you don’t have access to your weblogs, request it or change hosting companies. This information is crucial when creating media kits to send to potential advertisers because your traffic volume is one of the key decision points.

David Mullings is co-Founder and CEO of Realvibez Media, an integrated media and entertainment company focused primarily on Caribbean content. He is also a digital strategy consultant.