← Gone Away
Traffic Statistics
As mentioned in previous blogs (see "Oh, Blog it!" and "Is Blogging a Disease?"), statistics on traffic at our sites can give us an idea of whether the blog is reaching others or not. Mad and I get most of our information from something called Matrix Stats and part of our daily entertainment is in looking at the stats to see how well we did the day before. We get figures for hits (for the site as a whole and individual pages), sessions, browsers used (Firefox beats Internet Explorer by about 3 to 1 on our site), operating systems (overwhelmingly Windows XP), referrals from other sites (thank you Hinkybox!) and search engines, robot and crawler traffic, and the countries our visitors come from.
Obviously, the clearest indicator is the number of hits and sessions we get. I consider sessions to be a better guide to real traffic than hits since many hits are momentary visits by bots, crawlers and people who take one look and disappear forever. We want visitors who will stay and return and, since sessions consist of at least two page hits, these must form the majority of any session numbers.
I have always enjoyed fooling about with statistics and have made a couple of spreadsheets that help in understanding any trends over a period of time. A broad overall view is given by the monthly stats for MadTV:
We can see immediately that there has been a steady increase in the number of visitors to the site and that the proportion of visitors interested enough to look at more than one page is also increasing. Note that the ratio of sessions to hits has gone from about 1 to 8 in October to around 1 to 5 in January.
An overall view like this is good for seeing progress in general but, to see more immediate fluctuations, we need to look at the weekly stats. Here is the Hits & Stats information for the last eleven weeks i.e. from November 28 2004 to February 12 2005:
Week 5 is interesting. It was the holiday week and, predictably since many people would have had better things to do than sit at a computer, the hit count went very low at that time. But notice that the session count stayed pretty much as normal. To my mind, that indicates that our regular visitors are a pretty faithful bunch (or maybe they're so attached to their computers that family don't bother to call on them). We can see some trends more clearly if we look at it in graphical form, however:
Note that, although the general trend is upwards, the hit count for each week tends to go up and down a bit. Compare that to the session count which reflects a much steadier increase. Surely this must indicate an increasing number of visitors who return and become regulars. I hope so, anyway! The high spots in week 3 and week 7 of the hit stats are the result of Mad doing extensive alterations to the site in those weeks. I am happy to say that Mad has done none of that in Week 11, however, and this is our record week to date.
So the trend seems to be continually upwards. Mad and I have a little celebration each week as this continues. But here are some really meaningless statistics:
Total hits 3.10.04-14.2.05 106,756
Total sessions 3.10.04-14.2.05 18,950
Remember that these statistics are for the MadTV site as a whole. I do have stats for Gone Away but I'm keeping these a deep and dark secret...
Obviously, the clearest indicator is the number of hits and sessions we get. I consider sessions to be a better guide to real traffic than hits since many hits are momentary visits by bots, crawlers and people who take one look and disappear forever. We want visitors who will stay and return and, since sessions consist of at least two page hits, these must form the majority of any session numbers.
I have always enjoyed fooling about with statistics and have made a couple of spreadsheets that help in understanding any trends over a period of time. A broad overall view is given by the monthly stats for MadTV:
We can see immediately that there has been a steady increase in the number of visitors to the site and that the proportion of visitors interested enough to look at more than one page is also increasing. Note that the ratio of sessions to hits has gone from about 1 to 8 in October to around 1 to 5 in January.
An overall view like this is good for seeing progress in general but, to see more immediate fluctuations, we need to look at the weekly stats. Here is the Hits & Stats information for the last eleven weeks i.e. from November 28 2004 to February 12 2005:
Week 5 is interesting. It was the holiday week and, predictably since many people would have had better things to do than sit at a computer, the hit count went very low at that time. But notice that the session count stayed pretty much as normal. To my mind, that indicates that our regular visitors are a pretty faithful bunch (or maybe they're so attached to their computers that family don't bother to call on them). We can see some trends more clearly if we look at it in graphical form, however:
Note that, although the general trend is upwards, the hit count for each week tends to go up and down a bit. Compare that to the session count which reflects a much steadier increase. Surely this must indicate an increasing number of visitors who return and become regulars. I hope so, anyway! The high spots in week 3 and week 7 of the hit stats are the result of Mad doing extensive alterations to the site in those weeks. I am happy to say that Mad has done none of that in Week 11, however, and this is our record week to date.
So the trend seems to be continually upwards. Mad and I have a little celebration each week as this continues. But here are some really meaningless statistics:
Total hits 3.10.04-14.2.05 106,756
Total sessions 3.10.04-14.2.05 18,950
Remember that these statistics are for the MadTV site as a whole. I do have stats for Gone Away but I'm keeping these a deep and dark secret...