Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

I get daily reports on our Google AdSense channels as well Google Analytics for the SpaceRef network of sites. The last few days have seen some strange disconnect between the two. Google Analytics is reporting a surge in traffic, in particular to a couple of old stories.

Today it’s reporting that a particular story which is 4 1/2 years old has generated 21,000 pageviews. The referring traffic indicates it’s organic from Google and for a particular keyword phrase, “first laser”, which is coming in 14th and on page two of Google results for the phrase. Yet when I look at Google AdSense the channel data suggest that traffic does not exist.

So which is right and which is wrong? I’m leaning to a problem in reporting from Google Analytics. It’s only recently that for some of my larger sites I’ve switched over to Google Analytics and I’m wondering if I did the right thing?

I wonder how many other people are experiecing the same problem.

Recently I’ve went through an experience I would rather not repeat. I made an attempt to convert NASA Watch from our commercially licensed Movable Type 3.35, which it currently uses, to Wordpress 2.5 with results that did not please me.

For some time now I’ve been somewhat displeased with the lack of features I could easily add to Movable Type to enhance it. In so doing I forgot one important lesson, if it isn’t broken why mess with it. It was one thing to want additional features, it’s another to move over to another platform altogether. I wanted to move to Wordpress 2.5 because it offered a lot more features in an open source environment and because I thought it would save me time. Like so many other people I have a lot of projects on the go and my time has to be spread around each project.

After the conversion to Wordpress 2.5 failed I then tried to move NASA Watch to the new open source version of Movable Type 4.1 with results just as bad. And so here starts my tale of publishing woes.

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