Web Site Report - December 2007

2007, Christian Sauve

Ready for another look at the hum-drum routine of an obscure web site? Here are the monthly highlights for christian-sauve.com:

 

1. Mmm. Numbers...

My prickly "Urchin" web stats engine tells me that...

Report for: christian-sauve.com, December 2007
  Total Visitors       7,898  
  Total Pageviews     19,654  
    (Corrected total  11,607)
  Total Hits          22,034  
  Total Bytes Transferred   494.1MB  
  Average Visitors Per Day  254.77  
  Average Pageviews Per Day 634  
    (Corrected average      374)
  Average Hits Per Day      710.77  

The "corrected" numbers take out the CSS, robots.txt, PDFs, mis-filed graphic files (ICO, GIF, JPG) and other non-public files mistakenly considered "pages" by the statistics pre-digestion engine. All numbers are noticeably higher than last month.

Our top ten most popular pages are:

/reviews/movies/2002.htm       674
/index.html                    462
/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm  344
/reviews.html                  166
/texts/solaris-explanation.htm 133
/about.html                    119
/contactt.html                 112
/writings.html                 109
/links.html                    104
/search.html                   102

There is a perfectly lucid explanation as to why movie reviews for 2002 would end up in the top spot. Keep reading.

If you care about such things, (and who would not?), here's a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors, last month's results in parentheses):

Netscape|6    4128 (3126)
Explorer|6    1041 (1037)
Explorer|7     923 (662)
msnbot|1       262 (325)
CazoodleBot|x  176 (new)

Little change here. IE7 nibbles at the total some more.

 

2. Where do these people come from?

Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were

google.com/search     1021 (848)
www.google.ca/search   264 (314)
google.com/custom      219 (new)
google.co.uk/search    112 (76)
yahoo.com/search        65 (48)

I like Google and Google likes me. The appearance of the Google /custom search can, I think, be explained by the same factor that pushed the 2002 movie reviews to the top of the rankings. Keep reading...

No new noteworthy links this month.

 

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

One fun letter in the mailbox this month:

 

An anonymous correspondent asks...

I would be interested in your take on the John Twelve Hawks trilogy that begins with "The Traveler".  Book 3 of the trilogy not yet out.

Whenever possible, I try to wait until a planned trilogy is entirely published before committing to reading it. (The notable exceptions found elsewhere are just that: notable exceptions.) I have followed the "John Twelve Hawks" chatter since The Traveller came out in 2005 and would be mildly interested in seen what the fuss is about, but I will wait until all three books are out (probably in paperback, preferably at used book sales) before commenting any of them here. As for the identity of "John Twelve Hawks", the best theory I've read so far can easily be found by Googling "John Twelve Hawks screenwriter".

 

4. Search Queries Oddities

Here are our top-ten queries:

>who is the man that makes a call to new yorks 
  last phone booth - thereby setting           446
>solaris explained                              15
>movie sneak previews                           15
>the killing star                               13
>roderick thorpe                                10
>sneak preview movie tickets                     9
>advance screenings                              9
>solaris explanation                             8
>solaris ending                                  8
>amazon isbn                                     7

There's the killer query, at the top of the Top-10: A radio station trivia contest question, blindly put in Google by hundred of contestants. It doesn't take much more than that to distort up my monthly statistics.

 

Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain... obsessed by web statistics.