Web Site Report – August 2009
After a summer of changes, August 2009 was more business-as-usual for the site. While remnants of the old static site are still kicking around the server like dusty underpassages to appease the Google, christian-sauve.com is settling down in its new CMS routine. Let’s look at how this is shaking out numerically…
1. Mmm. Numbers…
According to Google, the central metrics for the month are…
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 859 | 741 |
| Page Views | 2,057 | 1,425 |
| Pages/Visits | 2.39 | 1.92 |
| Bounce Rate | 83% | 81% |
| Average Time on Site | 1:55 | 2:15 |
| New Visits % | 84% | 81% |
The first three numbers are better; the last three are worse. That’s the way it goes, right?
At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Total Visitors | 9,470 | 8,196 |
| Total Pageviews | 33,824 | 32,393 |
| (Corrected Total) | 14,987 | 17,967 |
| Total Hits | 45,755 | 42,860 |
| Total Bandwidth | 616.5MB | 621.2MB |
| Average Visitors/Day | 305 | 264 |
| Average Pageviews/Day | 1,091 | 1,044 |
| (Corrected average) | 500 | 580 |
| Average Hits/Day | 1,476 | 1,382 |
There’s a little bit of everything here, but compared to last month’s changes, it looks as if everything is stabilizing. Bandwidth, most notably, seems to have stayed the same. I expect the next few months to be roughly similar, as I delete more of the old static pages, refine my search engine exclusion directives and start having a presence on blog search engines.
According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:
| # | Page | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | /index.html | 226 |
| 2 | /texts/solaris-explanation.htm | 217 |
| 3 | /reviews.html | 158 |
| 4 | /the-reviews/index.html | 44 |
| 5 | /francais/index.html | 38 |
| 6 | /reviews/index.html | 38 |
| 7 | /reviews/2008/index.html | 30 |
| 8 | /reviews/2006/index.html | 29 |
| 9 | /reviews/2007/index.html | 27 |
| 10 | /texts/alternate-hugos.htm | 24 |
There’s a mixture of old-static and new-dynamic content here, which is to be expected as I slowly phase out the old material.
If you care about such things, (and boy it is mesmerizing!), 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) | 278 | 223 |
| 2 | IE 7.0 | 179 | 113 |
| 3 | IE 8.0 | 144 | 105 |
| 3 | Safari (all) | 77 | 76 |
| 4 | IE 6.0 | 66 | 70 |
Excellent news across the board: Every browser increases its numbers… except for you, IE6.
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 | 540 | 436 |
| 2. | yahoo / organic | 30 | – |
| 3. | bing / organic | 26 | 15 |
| 4. | en.wikipedia.org / referral | 17 | 17 |
| 5. | fractale-framboise.com / referral | 14 | 24 |
(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.)
Urchin, meanwhile, pegs the number of people coming in from bing as being much higher. Eh, who cares: Google remains on top no matter how you slice the data.
Speaking of which, Google now lists about 18,700 links for “Christian Sauvé”, up by almost one order of magnitude from last month. Since my own newly-redesigned site accounts only for 4,000 of those hits, I’m guessing that something has changed in the way Google indexes results. (In fact, if you try to get to the end of the list, it chokes out at something like 550 entries) There’s little of significance in the new links, although I got name-checked a few times for this I did at or around the Montréal Worldcon.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
Just one tiny whisper of activity in the mailbox this month. Let’s have a look:
1. An anonymous complaint:
Hi..I can’t see what the prickly urchin is doing because your site reports aren’t working. (404 File not found). I’m interested in what people search to get your site.
This is either because our anonymous visitor is still hanging in the static catacomb of the site, or because I hadn’t updated the links on the dynamic page. Oops. I have fixed the second and am working on the first.
4. Search Queries Oddities
According to Google Analytics, here are the month’s most popular search keywords:
| Keywords | Visits | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | solaris ending | 28 |
| 2 | solaris explained | 17 |
| 3 | solaris movie explanation | 16 |
| 4 | christian sauvé | 15 |
| 5 | solaris movie plot | 14 |
| 6 | christian sauve | 9 |
| 7 | torcon3 emerald city | 9 |
| 8 | solaris explanation | 8 |
| 9 | solaris movie ending | 8 |
| 10 | solaris movie summary | 8 |
the torcon3 thing is a bit of an outlier, but the rest is depressingly in-line with the usual. When I pass away, I hope they don’t stick “he explained Solaris okay” on my tombstone.
Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:
- @www.jesus sauve.com
- an animated movie where the main characters have to avoid hammers in order to keep their memories
- christian le suave
- is surrogates based on altered carbon?
- leelee sobieski aristocratic polish last name
- what fictional modern day vampire hunter use a +mathematical equation to track vampires?
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.
7,147