End of the year! 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 | 1,241 | 991 |
| Page Views | 1,984 | 1,472 |
| Pages/Visits | 1.60 | 1.49 |
| Bounce Rate | 87.3% | 84.7% |
| Average Time on Site | 0:51 | 0:50 |
| New Visits % | 90.9% | 87.4% |
The number look better, but there’s something wrong with them. Keep reading to find out what.
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 | 31,325 | 10,178 |
| Total Pageviews | 37,729 | 30,498 |
| Total Hits | 75,030 | 45,505 |
| Total Bandwidth | 723.6MB | 622.8MB |
| Average Visitors/Day | 1,010 | 339 |
| Average Pageviews/Day | 1,217 | 1,016 |
| Average Hits/Day | 2,420 | 1,516 |
Definitely something wrong; my site just isn’t that popular. Keep reading for the answer.
According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:
| # | Page | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | /texts/solaris-explanation.htm | 497 |
| 2 | /index | 201 |
| 3 | /reviews.html | 50 |
| 4 | /francais | 38 |
| 5 | /reviews/1996/books96b.htm | 36 |
| 6 | /the-reviews | 27 |
| 7 | /essays | 24 |
| 8 | /texts/100films.htm | 23 |
| 9 | /2009/11/kitchen-confidential-anthony-bourdain/ | 18 |
| 10 | /category/reviews/bookreview/index.php | 18 |
Not too bad, although I wish the Solaris article didn’t outrank my index page. (Google tells me there was a hug spike on December 20th, probably due to another network TV showing of the film.)
But the answer to the grossly overinflated page view numbers are to be found in the unfiltered Urchin stats, which tell me that my Mimic review has been requested 2,519 times, that my Post Grad review has been seen 279 times and other bizarre results: Simply put, I got hammered by spammers. Which I could tell from the spam itself.
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) | 444 | 377 |
| 2 | IE 8.0 | 236 | 193 |
| 3 | IE 7.0 | 175 | 161 |
| 4 | Safari (all) | 158 | 105 |
| 5 | IE 6.0 | 90 | 63 |
What you’re not seeing is that Chrome is within 25 points of taking over IE6 in 5th place.
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 | 876 | 643 |
| 2. | yahoo / organic | 91 | 72 |
| 3. | en.wikipedia.org / referral | 42 | 49 |
| 4. | alecospapadatos.blogspot.com / referral | 19 | – |
| 5. | bing / organic | 16 | 16 |
(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.)
The hits coming from alecospapadatos.blogspot.com are consequence of a mention of my review of Logicomix.
Google now lists about 13,700 links for “Christian Sauvé”, down from last month by almost a third, although at those numbers it doesn’t mean a lot.
According to Google Alerts, there weren’t any new major links this month. A lot of blog-spam, but no new links worth investigating.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
Guess what? A lot of spam.
Much of the spam comes in as blog post comments, by the truckload. Much of it can be scapped without a moment’s thought, being identical and making no pretence at being anything but spam. But from time to time, spammer get craftier. Consider this:
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can? And you et an account on Twitter?
Intriguing… except that the attached link to a Twitter-spam blog, and that a quick search on “And you et an account” nets hundreds of identical results. Deleted, mister spammer –you idiot.
There there are the people leaving asinine content-free comments in the hope of getting a link back to their site. Not gonna happen!
4. Search Queries Oddities
According to Google Analytics, here are the month’s most popular search keywords:
| Keywords | Visits | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | solaris ending | 55 |
| 2 | solaris explained | 51 |
| 3 | solaris movie explanation | 47 |
| 4 | solaris explanation | 23 |
| 5 | solaris film ending | 15 |
| 6 | solaris movie plot | 15 |
| 7 | solaris plot explanation | 15 |
| 8 | solaris movie ending | 13 |
| 9 | christian sauvé | 12 |
| 10 | christian sauve | 11 |
So, yeah. Solaris.
Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:
- “black actresses” and danger in action movies action movies for
- drop the gun! and you, santa, drop the elephant” 2003 comedy
- what is in gordons room? solaris
- why are christian movies so bad?
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.
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