Not much to say this month, as we settle into the fall season. Let’s see the numbers…
1. Mmm. Numbers…
According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 1,109 | 1,056 |
| Page Views | 1,771 | 1,887 |
| Pages/Visits | 1.60 | 1.79 |
| Bounce Rate | 86% | 82% |
| Average Time on Site | 0:45 | 1:03 |
| New Visits % | 85% | 83% |
For the second straight month, numbers are generally down from all across the board. Oh, woe.
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 | 11,022 | 10,820 |
| Total Pageviews | 35,117 | 35,868 |
| Total Hits | 54,867 | 52,324 |
| Total Bandwidth | 713.8MB | 679.2MB |
| Average Visitors/Day | 356 | 360 |
| Average Pageviews/Day | 1,132 | 1,195 |
| Average Hits/Day | 1769 | 1,744 |
Doesn’t look so catastrophic from that angle, so let’s put Urchin and Google in a ring and shout fight! fight! fight!
According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:
| # | Page | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | /index | 184 |
| 2 | /texts/solaris-explanation.htm | 137 |
| 3 | /2009/09/the-lost-symbol-dan-brown | 45 |
| 4 | /reviews.html | 42 |
| 5 | /being-canadian | 33 |
| 6 | /reviews/1996/books96b.htm | 30 |
| 7 | /the-reviews | 30 |
| 8 | /francais | 25 |
| 9 | /san-california-2009/index.php | 24 |
| 10 | /category/reviews/bookreview | 22 |
Very nice showing here by Dan Brown. If I learned anything from this, it would be to post more reviews of topical content. Hmmm…
If you care about such things, (and even if you don’t, 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) | 372 | 338 |
| 2 | IE 7.0 | 206 | 205 |
| 3 | IE 8.0 | 204 | 198 |
| 3 | Safari (all) | 155 | 120 |
| 4 | IE 6.0 | 77 | 86 |
Not much movement there. IE8 is now within spitting distance of IE7 and IE6 can’t stop dropping, so there’s hope out there for all of my web designer peeps.
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 | 709 | 640 |
| 2. | yahoo / organic | 88 | 82 |
| 3. | en.wikipedia.org / referral | 44 | 55 |
| 4. | bing / organic | 24 | 24 |
| 5. | books.google.com / referral | 22 | - |
(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 17,750 links for “Christian Sauvé”, up from last month. Most of that number seems illusory: this site itself only accounts for 6,100 results, and there are less than 1,000 results shown in the paged list.
The big new link of the month is a re-tweet of my review of Logicomix, which was another one of those “I get a Google News Alert of the author’s mention of the review 24 hours after posting the review” deal.
Otherwise, not much.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
This month featured a particularly empty mailbox, except for the spam. Harumph.
4. Search Queries Oddities
According to Google Analytics, here are the month’s most popular search keywords:
| Keywords | Visits | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | solaris ending | 20 |
| 2 | what part of canada’s political system is uniquely canadian and what shows influence of british governance? | 19 |
| 3 | torcon3 emerald city | 17 |
| 4 | christian sauvé | 12 |
| 5 | solaris movie explanation | 12 |
| 6 | solaris explained | 10 |
| 7 | christian sauve | 8 |
| 8 | from the notebooks of dr. brain sauve | 8 |
| 9 | 100 good movies | 7 |
| 10 | glenn kleier | 7 |
It would worry me witless to think that my site is a source of information about the canadian political/governance system, but I have concluded a while ago that Google is just making things up when it comes to search keywords. (Well, except for the “christian sauve” searches. Those are legit, you hear me? Totally legit.)
Assorted popular topics of search keywords this month included Hunter S. Thompson, Dan Brown and his Lost Symbol and the “Nikola Tesla Rockstar Scientist” poster I mentioned in my review of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:
- “bon cop bad cop” slash fanfiction
- “i’m not here to tell you how it ends”
- “love being tortured”
- the 100 most amusingly bad movies ever made
- vancouver terminal yellow mound
- what the hell happened at the end of solaris? movie
- when will mutineer hunter thompson letters be published
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.
7,147
Christian,
May I ask, why does my name show up on your website report?
Just curious.
Thanks,
Glenn
Hello Glenn,
I can only assume that it’s because Google ranks my review of the novel The Last Day in its top-10 results for “Glenn Kleier”. I’m as surprised as you are about it.