Web Site Report – September 2009
As christian-sauve.com slowly settles into its new dynamically-driven profile, September 2009 doesn’t stand out as a particularly note-worthy month. Let’s see the numbers…
1. Mmm. Numbers…
According to Google, the central metrics for the month are…
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 1,056 | 859 |
| Page Views | 1,887 | 2,057 |
| Pages/Visits | 1.79 | 2.39 |
| Bounce Rate | 82% | 83% |
| Average Time on Site | 1:03 | 1:55 |
| New Visits % | 83% | 84% |
Most of the numbers are worse. Oh well…
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 | 10,820 | 9,470 |
| Total Pageviews | 35,868 | 33,824 |
| (Corrected Total) | 14,987 | |
| Total Hits | 52,324 | 45,755 |
| Total Bandwidth | 679.2MB | 616.5MB |
| Average Visitors/Day | 360 | 305 |
| Average Pageviews/Day | 1,195 | 1,091 |
| (Corrected average) | 500 | |
| Average Hits/Day | 1,744 | 1,476 |
Well isn’t that just cute: Better numbers all the way down. Oh, Google, you suck when you tell me bad news.
According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:
| # | Page | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | /index | 225 |
| 2 | /texts/solaris-explanation.htm | 128 |
| 3 | /reviews.html | 61 |
| 4 | /reviews/1996/books96b.htm | 44 |
| 5 | /francais | 38 |
| 6 | /the-reviews | 38 |
| 7 | /2009/09/the-lost-symbol-dan-brown | 30 |
| 8 | /category/reviews/bookreview | 29 |
| 9 | /being-canadian | 27 |
| 10 | /the-about | 24 |
For the first time, dynamic content takes a top spot, with a surprise appearance by a single review. I never thought I’d say this, but they ya go: Thank you, Dan Brown!
If you care about such things, (and I do! I do!!), 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) | 338 | 278 |
| 2 | IE 7.0 | 205 | 179 |
| 3 | IE 8.0 | 198 | 144 |
| 3 | Safari (all) | 120 | 77 |
| 4 | IE 6.0 | 86 | 66 |
Not much movement there.
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 | 640 | 540 |
| 2. | yahoo / organic | 82 | 30 |
| 3. | en.wikipedia.org / referral | 55 | 17 |
| 4. | bing / organic | 24 | 26 |
| 5. | fractale-framboise.com / referral | 17 | 14 |
(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.)
Google now lists about 17,600 links for “Christian Sauvé”, down almost 1,100 hits from last month. Most of that number seems illusory (this site itself only accounts for 4,300 results, and there aren’t more than 550 results shown in the paged list.
Now that I have a Google Alert on my name, it’s easier than ever to note the various new links to the site. Certainly, those alerts have clearly demonstrated how quickly the web can move now that I’m part of the blogosphere: Not much more than 24 hours after posting the review of a particular book, I received a notice that the book’s author had linked back to my site in noting the review. For those of you taking place at home, it means that the following had occured in barely a day:
- I post a review
- Google indexes review
- (I presume) Google sends an alert to the author
- Author writes, posts mention
- Google indexes mention
- Google sends me an alert
Whew!
Otherwise, those alerts were goodenough to notify me about another Christian Sauvé taking up residence on Facebook, and (probably) another another 15-year-old Christian Sauvé taking up MMA. Good luck to him… and I hope he grows up to become a feared competitor who will make the name “Christian Sauvé” interchangeable with “fierce fighter”.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
There wasn’t anything in the mailbox this month, but the spam is certainly picking up on the blog. Most of it is forgettable, but there’s one that I particularly liked:
“Chicken” writes to say
I used to have money but after 6 months of a 10 Roosters per day habit I am now broke
I know it’s spam because I can Google that exact same sentence (and also because it links back to a US chicken fast food chain), but it still made me laugh.
4. Search Queries Oddities
According to Google Analytics, here are the month’s most popular search keywords:
| Keywords | Visits | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | torcon3 emerald city | 27 |
| 2 | solaris ending | 16 |
| 3 | christian sauvé | 15 |
| 4 | christian sauve | 14 |
| 5 | solaris explained | 11 |
| 6 | solaris movie explanation | 9 |
| 7 | glenn kleier | 8 |
| 8 | solaris movie plot | 7 |
| 9 | what part of canada’s political system is uniquely canadian and what shows influence of british governance? | 7 |
| 10 | sauve | 6 |
The christian sauve and solaris stuff I understand; the rest, not so much. Sometimes, I think of Google Analytics are the brilliant PhD guy who occasionally goes on absinthe benders and ends up ranting profanely about telepath geckos in the middle of his thesis.
Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:
- how to build a crate
- big screen vs small screen at ottawa’s world exchange theatre
- poissonnerie christian sauvé
- postmodern struggle in dude wheres my car
- what does dan brown have against christians?
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.
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