Web Site Report - May 2008

2008, 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, May 2008
  Total Visitors     10,738  
  Total Pageviews    24,441  
    (Corrected total  15,316)
  Total Hits    28,349  
  Total Bytes Transferred   525.8MB  
  Average Visitors Per Day   346.38  
  Average Pageviews Per Day   788.41  
    (Corrected average      494)
  Average Hits Per Day   914.48

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 slightly higher for some reason or another.

Ever-gloomier Google Analytics puts the monthly result at 935 visits and 1409 page views, both lower numbers than last month. Damn your more accurate algorithms, Google!

 

According to Urchin, our top ten most popular pages are 

/index.html                         895
/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm       277
/reviews.html                       236
/about.html                         221
/writings.html                      170
/links.html                         162
/texts/solaris-explanation.htm      162
/search.html                        158
/ct.html                            154
/texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 140

No changes here. Meanwhile, Google Analytics says...

1. /index.html 144
2. /reviews.html 109
3. /texts/solaris-explanation.htm 86
4. /francais/index.html 55
5. /reviews/2004/reviews-2004-08august.html 33
6. /about.html 28
7. /reviews/movies/2002.htm 27
8. /writings.html 24
9. /reviews/1999/books99f.htm 23
10. /reviews/2003/books03k.htm 23

...which is roughly consistent with last month's results.

 

If you care about such things, (and who would not?), 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 IE 7.0 338 390
2. Firefox 288 297
3 IE 6.0 178 205

 

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Urchin, our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were

google.com/search     869 (1017)
www.google.ca/search  199 (176)
live.com/results.aspx  78 (71)
google.co.uk/search    68 (112)
google.com/books       57 (62)

As you may expect by now, Google Analytics has a slightly different view of the situation:

  Source This Month Last Month
1. google / organic 667 739
2. yahoo / organic 38 21
3. fractale-framboise.com / referral 12 (New)
4. fortrel.net / referral 8 (New)
5. en.wikipedia.org / referral 7 (New)

(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.)

There were no other new links this month. I'll note again, with mixed feelings, that between spam sites repurposing my content and at least half a dozen other Christian Sauvés running around the web, it's getting increasingly difficult to ego-surf my own name.

There is, however, a neat new site that performs a bit of semantic analysis on my home page at http://therarestwords.com/christian-sauve.com. Interesting.

 

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

There was still a lot of spam in the mailbox last month.

But it wasn't all bad: Two casual acquaintances made further contact via my web site, the publisher of Beccon Press notified me of their new web site at beccon.org (which showcases a new book I'll review shortly), and the following landed in my email box:

If I would have know about your book reviews at an earlier age, I could have saved a lot of money and time, thanks for your over all picture/writings about authors and what they write.

Thanks! Given the amount of money I spend on books per year, it's great to learn that I can help others make better-informed decisions.

 

4. Search Queries Oddities

According to Google Analytics, here are the month's most popular search keywords:

  Keywords Visits
1 solaris explained 196
2 solaris ending 12
3 christian sauve 10
4 christian sauvé 9
5 tia layne 8
6 fabled procrastinator 5
7 olympos book review 5
8 solaris explanation 5
9 frank camper 4
10 index.of "brown, dale" 4

SOLARIS, confusing much?

On the other hand, I am now definitely removing any mention of "Tia Layne" from my review of Rick Mofina's No Way Back : The name of his antagonist now belongs to a small-time blonde porn model, and the less amount of porn-related traffic I get, the better I'll feel.

 

Other amusing search keywords:

 

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