Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » In depth Stats analysis

In depth Stats analysis

Posted on March 15th in Blogging — 5 Comments so far. Got something to say?

I don’t know about you, but I love stats, and especially website stats that give you an in depth report on everything from search engines, referrers, etc… So I’m going to write about all the stats that I have, collected from two different sources, and then for those interested I’ll give a little insight into how you can go about obtaining similar figures.

Hit Stats

I don’t get very much traffic compared to some blogs, but I’m definitely not one to complain. I use two methods to track hit stats. First, I use FireStats, the WordPress plugin and have been using it since I can remember. This is a pretty good app for referrers, totals and especially geo tracking, but it doesn’t give you the day by day analysis which seems to be most important to everyone. Because of that, I also use eXTReMe Tracking for the daily stuff, and have been since January 28th, 2007. It requires a button shown to use it, and it’s public, so if you can find it, have fun

As far as unique visitors go, I’ve averaged 129/day since Jan. 28th, but recently it’s been 50-60/day. The high amount per day is because of the one day (Jan. 31st) I had 1657 hits, and that followed with good numbers in the high to mid hundreds and then of course dwindled down.

One key thing is that when I had all this traffic, on Jan. 31st, I capitalized on it. The next day I released a free WordPress theme, and the day after that I posted a long rant about browser versions. When you get traffic from a source like that, you have to try and keep it from fading, because it eventually will. The WordPress theme also helped the traffic stay up, and it created a number of backlinks, which also help traffic.

At the time of writing, I have gotten 92 visits, which is a little higher than the normal has been recently, and with this post it should finish 120~ or higher. One thing that readers don’t like is too many posts, so that they can’t keep up. But how many is too many? I would say two is fine if you spread it out. This will be my second post for today, and I’ll post at least once tomorrow, giving this post a maximum of two or three days on my front page (3 posts- helps with load time). It’s important that late readers still get a chance to see the posts you write, you would want them to anyways, but in my case, I write relatively long entries (this one might be huge) and can only have so much room at the front.

The typical visitor of this site is an American using FireFox 2 on 32 bit colour 1280*1024 resolution running Windows XP. However, Alexa users that visit this site are quote different. My Alexa rank is pretty mediocre at 332,372. Alexa tells me that more than a third of users that come here with the Alexa tool bar are from the UK. Interesting stat, if you know that most of my clients (85% I’d say) are from the UK. Another cool Alexa stat: 12% of visitors are from Slovenia, and I am ranked 11k in Slovenia, and have been top 8k. As for a global scale, my best Alexa rating to date is around 55k, on the same day as the big traffic surge. It would’ve been much better, but these were mainly Safari users on OS X.

I could go on forever more about this, but I’m going to move on to referrers and SE traffic, so this doesn’t get too long.

Referrers and Search Engines

Starting with search engines. I don’t get a lot of SE traffic, mainly because I don’t really have a website that demands, or tries for it. SEs account for 2.57% of all my traffic, so it’s not something I put too much thought into, except for my name. As long as a Google search for my name turns me up as #1 I’m happy. My two top terms are split right down the middle at 36% each for “connor” and “wilson”. That’s basically what I was going for anyways!

As for referrers, my #1 with a little under 1000 is MacSurfer and all the other sites that syndicate it account for a bunch too, the most notable being LowEndMac. The WordPress extension and news site, WeblogToolCollection is #2 with around 700, and it also has sites that syndicate it.

If there’s a good kind of short term, burst like traffic is if you can get on a site that is widely syndicated like MacSurfer or WTC. This makes the burst traffic not wear out as fast, as the late sites will start contributing the next day. I was fortunate enough to get the burst traffic from MacSurfer and all its syndicators, and then the WTC traffic the day after.

If I could make one observation from my referrers, I would note that most of my traffic comes when I write something and is taken by other people and spread through social networks and bookmarking services. I could also say forum signatures work alright, not contributing a lot but MintPages, which is a private community for skilled developers has contibuted quite a bit from forum threads.

RSS Stats

Using FeedBurner as my basis for all these observations, first I have to say that FeedBurner’s control panel for analyzing all your feeds and their stats is great, especially for someone like me. It’s in depth, easy to use and easy to gather conclusions. My RSS record was 112 on February 2nd or so (can’t view that far back) and it was around 50 for the next couple of days.

The most used feed reader surprisingly is FireFox Live Bookmarks. I only have one reader who uses BlogLines, which is surprising because I use BlogLines (it’s not me) many times a day, and it’s great. The Google reader is a close second, and then everything else is one person using something different. There’s many reader options, here’s a few:

Omea Reader
NewsGator
My Yahoo
Magpie RSS
OS X Based reader
Windows Based reader
Java Based reader
FeedBurner email subscriptions

Quite a variety, but I’m happy no matter what client they choose

I’m going to make this conclusion short here, as I could write for days about this, and even add more sections. Depending on the response here, I might do another post like this. I know I love it when people write about their stats or money, or stuff like that.