Patterico's Pontifications

9/9/2012

SiteMeter Communication Sucks

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 4:19 pm



So I had a technical problem with SiteMeter. It’s not really important what it was. (They failed to add hundreds of thousands of hits to my total; the hits showed up on monthly/daily reports but were absent from the total.) I wrote them about it. Several times. They never wrote back, beyond canned responses that did nothing to address my individual question. (They talked about a server move losing stats for a day or two. But I lost a good month’s worth of hits.)

I don’t recommend their paid service. If you want to use them for free and are fine with a complete and total lack of communication — and a service that may underrepresent your totals without explanation — fine. But if customer service matters to you at all? Find someone else.

9 Responses to “SiteMeter Communication Sucks”

  1. And I gave them plenty of opportunity to fix the situation (or at least talk to me about it) before I blasted them publicly.

    Patterico (83033d)

  2. Well, they won’t get offended by your posting this here, since – by their own data – very few people stop by to read anything you post, so what’s to worry about?

    Just another sterling example of what we have come to expect as Customer Service in the Progressive Age.

    AD-Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (2bb434)

  3. i hate them so much

    happyfeet (f3ee52)

  4. Reminds me of the problem I had with mint.com. My (relatively small) bank upgraded their account authorization procedures, and mint.com suddenly couldn’t access my account info anymore. Fine, these things happen. I log into the mint.com support forums, and find that other customers of my bank are also posting about the problem, and that a bank employee is also posting on the same support thread saying “Our login procedure changed, here’s what mint.com will have to do to get the site working with our bank again, and here’s my phone number if you have questions.” Fine, I thought: it’ll be working again within a few day, right?

    Nine(!) months later, I gave up on mint.com ever getting their stuff working, posted a note on that same forum thread saying something like “if this wasn’t a free service, I’d be demanding my money back. In fact, I still feel like I should be asking for my money back. I’m certainly never using Mint again.”

    That was over a year ago, and I still feel annoyed enough about it to post about it. And to tell everyone I know not to depend on Mint’s nonexistent customer service.

    Robin Munn (69cc95)

  5. The number of times I’ve read posts like this.

    htom (412a17)

  6. BTW, Mint, I hope you enjoy the search engine results you’ll be getting from “mint.com customer service” or “Mint customer service” now! Well done! /sarc

    Robin Munn (69cc95)

  7. Sitemeter’s features, including the premium features it offers only to paying members, have neither changed nor improved since I joined in 2004, at least so far as I can notice. The company that has hosted my blog to my satisfaction at trivial expense since 2003, TypePad, also offers more limited metrics which I believe to be more reliable, but they cannot be reconciled with Sitemeter’s. Sitemeter was a great idea, and I wish it were indeed more authoritative, but my sense is that its market penetration has substantially shrunk, making it less useful for purposes of comparison — which is, after all, one of its major purposes.

    Beldar (eed156)

  8. Perhaps its market penetration would not have contracted if they had done a better job of satisfying the market….
    Oh, wait…
    that would mean they hadn’t slept through (even if they had enrolled in) Econ-101.
    We are surrounded by Maroons!

    AD-Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (2bb434)

  9. Maybe try NeoCounter, or a novelty counter like RevolverMaps.

    The Sanity Inspector (93bc4f)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0687 secs.