Now that we’re adding content to this site once more, let’s check the numbers.
1. Mmm. Numbers…
According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 1,491 |
1,197 |
| Page Views | 2,063 |
1,699 |
| Pages/Visits | 1.38 | 1.42 |
| Bounce Rate | 88.60% |
89.47% |
| Average Time on Site | 00:39 | 00:57 |
| New Visits % | 91.62% |
90.98% |
Pretty good news: While the bounces are still high (which is normal for a search-engine-driven site), the content-posting frenzy of early July, along with updated Google XML maps, clearly had an effect.
For comparison’s sake, here is what my old-school Urchin stats are telling me:
| Metric | This Month | Last Month |
|---|---|---|
| Total Visitors | 9,635 | 9,201 |
| Total Pageviews | 49,397 | 48,672 |
| Total Hits | 66,671 | 62,705 |
| Total Bandwidth | 872.4MB | 754.2MB |
| Average Visitors/Day | 310.8 | 306.7 |
| Average Pageviews/Day | 1,593.4 | 1,622.4 |
| Average Hits/Day | 2,150.67 | 2,090.16 |
A more-modest increase there, which is interesting given how it suggests that the bump in visits is from authentic human visitors rather than robots, spiders and spammers.
According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:
| # | Page | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | /solaris-2002-explained | 387 |
| 2 | /index | 220 |
| 3 | /how-to-get-free-movie-tickets | 188 |
| 4 | /100-good-films | 66 |
| 5 | /1996/09/arc-light-eric-l-harry | 43 |
| 6 | /2010/07/the-fuller-memorandum-charles-stross | 40 |
| 7 | /being-canadian | 38 |
| 8 | /essays | 37 |
| 9 | /the-about | 36 |
| 10 | /reviews/1999/books99g.htm | 34 |
An interesting mixture of flagship essays and latest content. Still wish the index page was higher that the Solaris article.
Since you can’t get enough of this 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) | 499 | 358 |
| 2 | IE 8.0 | 361 | 290 |
| 3 | Safari (all) | 185 | 164 |
| 4 | Chrome | 165 | 135 |
| 5 | IE 7.0 | 120 | 111 |
Stability and good news at the same time.
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 | 1,005 | 790 |
| 2. | yahoo / organic | 55 | 40 |
| 3. | en.wikipedia.org / referral | 52 | 43 |
| 4. | books.google.com / referral | 24 | 22 |
| 5. | bing / organic | 17 | – |
(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 spectacular increase in Google referrals confirms that the updated XML sitemaps are having an impact.
Ego-surf update: Google now gives 15,600 results for “Christian Sauvé”, up significantly sharply from last month. It has now indexed 1,270 pages on this site, which is about twice more than last month, but still about a third of the total content. No new noteworthy results spotted in the Google top-50.
3. Ohhh! Visitor comments!
One neat thing: Expat Jeff writes to say:
July 2010 re Solaris. Lem and Soderbergh tell us in book and script respectively, that the existence of man is a mathematical probability. Ergo, so is the existence of God and heaven a mathematical probability – sans all the trappings of ritual and magi.
I wish I could be smarter and have something to add to this.
4. Search Queries Oddities
According to Google Analytics, here are the month’s most popular search keywords:
| Keywords | Visits | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | solaris movie explanation | 43 |
| 2 | solaris ending | 36 |
| 3 | solaris explained | 30 |
| 4 | solaris explanation | 20 |
| 5 | solaris movie plot | 20 |
| 6 | top 100 christian movies | 18 |
| 7 | adam roberts gradisil sauve | 15 |
| 8 | solaris ending explained | 13 |
| 9 | solaris plot explanation | 12 |
| 10 | christian sauvé | 10 |
Is Solaris still confusing people eight years later? Apparently so. It’s a good thing I haven’t put up an aexplanation of Inception.
Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords: [my comments in square brackets]
- “six levels” inception [Uh-oh...]
- apocalypto slash fanfiction [Just say no!]
- can someone explain solaris [Many people can. They're not all right.]
- film french woman cancan buys cafe absurd dance in street [I like the image]
- is there any way i can get free movie tickets? [Indeed]
- vision has changed and can see my eyelashes all the time [That happened to me]
- what does christian married adults do for date night? [What other couples do?]
- what genre is lovely bones [It's a genre hybrid in the service of a non-genre story.]
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.