Political

The curious case of Nadine Dorries’s website traffic

Reports of Nadine Dorries’s website traffic levels appear to greatly exaggerate the truth, but the Conservative MP has not been willing to put the record straight.

Earlier this month Bedford Today quoted Nadine Dorries as saying:

Having so many people visiting the site can be quite scary – according to Google I had 800,000 readers in July.

Google Analytics doesn’t provide a “readers” figure, and it’s therefore not clear exactly what her figure refers to (plus it is always possible either she made a slip of the tongue or the reporter got the phrase slightly wrong).

But let’s see how this figure might compare.

Both Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes publish monthly statistics from Google too. In July, Guido has 113,118 absolute unique visitors and Iain Dale had 59,441. 800,000 just doesn’t sound anywhere close to credible in this context: seven times as many as Guido, really?

Perhaps she really meant visits. I don’t have their figures for July, but I do have those for June: 476,745 and 303,890 respectively. Again, Nadine Dorries’s figure just doesn’t sound plausible. Do you really think she’s getting more visits than Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes combined?

In other words: the claim of 800,000 readers (or any reasonable variation on the term ‘readers’) looks to be wrong. I twice contacted Nadine Dorries’s office asking for an explanation or correction, once by email and once by phone, but have not received any response.