IMHO: 2 November 2007
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IMHO: 2 November 2007 |
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When I clicked the View Reports link, I was in for a real surprise. For a long time (about a decade, in fact), I've resisted adding a "hit counter" to The Avengers Forever. Although hit counters remain popular, they are not very reliable. Detailed metrics have always been available for any website, courtesy of the host's logs, but it costs money to retrieve the data and parse it into human-readable form. Now comes Google Analytics, a website traffic analysis engine that provides more data than you can shake a mouse at—all totally free. When I threw the switch last month, I could scarcely believe the numbers that started trickling in. The Avengers Forever was being hit an average of over 800 times a day. Yikes! That's nearly three times as much as I'd been estimating up to now. Here's a detailed breakdown for the month of October:
What do these numbers mean? Total visits is just that: a count of the total number of visitors to the website, including repeats. The unique visitors number omits the repeats. New visitors are those who had not been to the site prior to the reporting period. Page views is the total number of web pages the web host delivered to all visitors. Pages per visit is the average number of pages a visitor accessed, and the average time on the site is how long the typical visitor hung around before leaving. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who landed on a given web page and immediately left the website from there; the lower the bounce rate, the more interesting or relevant the site is to a visitor (therefore, the lower the number, the better). None of this could possibly have been derived from an ordinary hit counter. Nor could any of these interesting statistics: 58% of all inbound traffic originated from search engines; 26% were direct hits (bookmarks); and 16% of visitors arrived via links from other websites (referrals). Every page of this website is tracked, all 1,145 of them. So, we can learn things such as this: the home page is accessed only 9% of the time, and that's the page with the highest traffic. Which means the vast majority of visitors arrive within the website itself. The What's New page is the fourth-most often hit page, meaning that a lot of folks are most likely repeat visitors coming back to check up on things; yet the Program Introduction page is in the top ten (a big surprise!), indicating that there's still a great many new people trying to learn about the show. With well over half of all visitors arriving via search engines, we can learn a great deal about what folks are looking for, because all of that information is captured. (By the way, only about half arrive via Google; 5% are from Yahoo, 2% from Google Images, 1% from AOL, and 26% from everything else, such as MSN.) Here's the Top Ten Search Terms, in absolute number of hits:
Naturally these numbers change from month to month. But what probably won't change much is the set of "stock searches," which would include the first five or six of this list, plus such standards as "diana rigg nude," "queen of sin" and "touch of brimstone," which all reside in the top 100 out of about 4,000 unique keywords. Why are these statistics important? Because I can use them to fine-tune the website to help people find information better, and capture more potential fans. For example, I might think about adding more links to the Program Introduction page to help newbies find their way around and learn more about the show. I could also do something fun like this: I could create a special new web page called "diana rigg nude." This would be the first page these perverts hit, and then I can set the record straight for them: there are no nude pictures of Diana anywhere on the internet, and if they did happen to find any, they would be guaranteed fakes. Are you nervous yet? Here's even more information. In just one month, the site has been visited by people in 119 countries. Naturally the bulk are from the United States (10,012) and the United Kingdom (7,835). But it's much easier to count the countries that have not have any visitors: Greenland, Panama and Cuba, a couple tiny ones in South America, much of Africa, and several in the Middle and Far East. Everyplace else has checked in, from Iceland to Kazakhstan.
Then there are these interesting tidbits:
Although I do not have an enormous amount of time to devote to the site these days, rest assured that some of this information will be used to help shape The Avengers Forever going forward. Not to mention that my own perception of TAF has been substantially altered: I had no idea just how busy this place had become. I've created a monster! And that's my humble opinion. David K. Smith, 2 November 2007 |
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