Freelance Unbound

Here’s a teaser for those WordPress stats geeks who simply can’t wait until March to read the full-year update on this blog’s web analytics.
Moving to self-hosted WordPress away from the coziness of WordPress.com has caused a certain amount of stats upheaval. Primarily this is because I now have Google Analytics installed.
WP stats
Up until the move I was relying on WordPress’s own stats – which gave me a low readership number. I now realise this is because the WordPress stats only count visits to specific posts. Anyone visiting the home page and reading down the posts from there wasn’t counted.
Google Analytics
This meant that when I switched to the new site and started using Google Analytics my readership at least doubled, and sometimes tripled, depending on the day I was measuring. Which is nice.
The Google Analytics graph and the WordPress stats graph track each other nearly all the time. The only difference is that the Google results are higher.
Except on one day.
Damned lies and statistics
My WordPress stats for Saturday December 5 show 202 views, while Google seems to show fewer than 100.  Which makes no sense whatsoever – how can more people have clicked through to individual posts than actually visited the site as a whole?
Can anyone make sense of why WordPress stats recorded this bizarre traffic spike? If any WordPress geeks reading this have any suggestions I’d be more than happy to hear them…