July 2009 was the first full month of operation of christian-sauve.com as a fully-dynamic database-powered web site. As such, this report also marks a transition to a new way of counting the site’s activity metrics. Don’t be afraid, and have a look at the stats below…
1. Mmm. Numbers…
This report used to depend on straight web-log statistics to estimate its number of visitors and page views. This isn’t such a good idea with a database-driven engine such as WordPress: Modern content-management systems use a lot of support files, even for the simplest humblest page views. Simple page counts don’t work well when each page requires about fifteen hits…
Fortunately, there’s Google Analytics, which crunches a lot of the numbers for me.
According to Google, the central metrics for the month are…
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 741 | 650 |
| Page Views | 1,425 | 1,471 |
| Pages/Visits | 1.92 | 2.26 |
| Bounce Rate | 81% | 84% |
| Average Time on Site | 2:15 | 1:47 |
| New Visits % | 81% | 88% |
There’s no sense pretending that those are good numbers, but a few good metrics are, at least, improving. This being said, much of this improvement is artificial: to help people poke around the site after its redesign, I have kept much of the old static site active even as Google and everyone else come to grip with the new dynamic one.
At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, groos hit over-inflation and all:
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Total Visitors | 8,196 | 7,147 |
| Total Pageviews | 32,393 | 25,812 |
| (Corrected Total) | 17,967 | 12,155 |
| Total Hits | 42,860 | 32,295 |
| Total Bandwidth | 621.2MB | 477.8MB |
| Average Visitors/Day | 264 | 238 |
| Average Pageviews/Day | 1,044 | 860 |
| (Corrected average) | 580 | 405 |
| Average Hits/Day | 1,382 | 1,076 |
The (Corrected) numbers I used to depend upon now makes little sense: How can you tell when a page request is a legitimate page request when there are tag pages and category pages and feed URLs?
Otherwise, well, the number are more or less as expected: a lot more activity (mostly from search engines) a staggering increase in bandwidth and all the other hallmarks of a site with a sudden ten-fold increase in pages. This is the new normal.
According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:
| # | Page | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | /index.html | 191 |
| 2 | /reviews.html | 140 |
| 3 | /texts/solaris-explanation.htm | 121 |
| 4 | /francais/index.html | 34 |
| 5 | /reviews/index.html | 28 |
| 6 | /about.html | 21 |
| 7 | /the-reviews/index.html | 19 |
| 8 | /texts/100films.htm | 18 |
| 9 | /the-about/index.html | 17 |
| 10 | /links.html | 15 |
There’s some cold irony, I suppose, in seeing that my old pages are still dominating the top-10. That will change once Google catches onto the new site structure.
If you care about such things, (and it is fascinating stuff!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:
| Browser | This Month | Last Month | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Firefox (all) | 223 | 212 |
| 2 | IE 7.0 | 113 | 127 |
| 3 | IE 8.0 | 105 | 65 |
| 3 | Safari (all) | 76 | 68 |
| 4 | IE 6.0 | 70 | 63 |
The faster IE 6.0 dies, the better everyone will be. Yes, even you.
2. Where do these people come from?
According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:
| Source | This Month | Last Month | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | google / organic | 436 | 410 |
| 2. | books.google.com / referral | 46 | 9 |
| 3. | fractale-framboise.com / referral | 24 | - |
| 4. | en.wikipedia.org / referral | 17 | 9 |
| 5. | bing / organic | 15 | 10 |
(Lingo key: “Organic” is Google’s way of saying that no one has paid for links leading back to christian-sauve.com on those search engines. “Referral” is supposed to be a direct link to this site.)
There’s an interesting rise in hits from books.google.com; I wonder if this is SEO in action now that my books reviews have prominent meta-data.
Google now lists about 3150 links for “Christian Sauvé”, up from last month. A look at the top-100 results showed no new links of significance.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
A bit of activity in the mailbox this month. Let’s have a look:
1. Jeff from the UK had something to say about SOLARIS (2002)…
I would like to touch on the confusion about the higgs machine and the final warning from phantom-snow.
Firstly the higgs field is a theory which gives rise to mass throughout the universe. Gordon and phantom-snow decide that the phantoms are stabalised atomically by this field, and create a machine to unstabilise the particles of the phantoms, dispersing their matter into the universe. Playing with the higgs field distured the mass distribution and caused the ship to increase in mass thus the gravity acting on the ship increased, causing them to plumit to the surface of solaris.
I think this film may have something to do with parrallel universes and solaris somehow allows the crew members to dip in and out of this alternate universe. One theory behind alternate universes is that everytime a desicion is made multiple universes branch from ours with every possible out come of the desicion occuring in each new universe. This would give rise to the child and rheya still being alive but not having the same memories (she remembered taking the pregancy test, chris wasnt there to “pass” the memory to phantom-rheya, the choice of aborting the child resulted in the splitting of the universes). its a possibility
Intriguing!
2. Dana from Oklahoma asked…
I would like to offer my review of a new Christian DVD coming out (…)
No, I don’t accept review copies.
4. Search Queries Oddities
According to Google Analytics, here are the month’s most popular search keywords:
| Keywords | Visits | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | solaris ending | 15 |
| 2 | solaris explained | 15 |
| 3 | christian sauve | 12 |
| 4 | christian sauvé | 12 |
| 5 | “crazy navy” site:christian-sauve.com | 11 |
| 6 | solaris movie plot | 9 |
| 7 | solaris movie explanation | 8 |
| 8 | solaris explanation | 6 |
| 9 | explain solaris | 5 |
| 10 | glenn kleier | 4 |
Much Solaris again. Kind of wondering about the site-specific “crazy navy” thing, though…
Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:
- csi blooper cats cradle eric george
- bite me, bitch” harlan ellison
- “for every timeless” zomby
- gloria fluffy novelty
- lighting cigars with dollar bills
- sex at conventions worldcon
- what 2002 movie was marketed with the tagline:the only way he can stay pro, is to play (like) a girl.
- what happened in the book brasyl
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.
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