ANALYTICS [A VDOV REVIEW]
In order to break up the mid-week malaise that the writing staff at vdov has seemed to slumped into I thought I would cull out some nuggets from our Google Analytics account. Costa wrote a post about it before but at the time we didn’t have a large timeline of data. Now we have almost 4 months of data (which has remained surprisingly consistent) so here is a rundown of vdov.net stats.
SINCE NOV. 16 2005
–77.5% of users are first time visitors.
–57% of people get to the site by direct linking, 26% from google, and the next two highest are referrals from purdue.facebook.com and technorati.com at about 2% of users.
–The most referrals we have ever had is 26 in one day and the average is around 8 per day.
–We get about 15 search engine hits a day.
–People who find us from technorati.com view the most pages on the site (~3 which is huge considering we are really a one page type of site) followed by people linking from thepacificanonline.com (~2.7).
–We average 30 unique visitors a day (which isn’t bad considering that Costa and I probably don’t have 30 friends combined). My guess is that most of these are Shawna’s friends.
–About 74% of vdov users are Firefox users. While we may not have the most visitors we seem to have the smart ones. Also, some jerk has visited using Konqueror 6 times… seriously who uses Linux?
–Costa takes the sympathy vote with this article taking the cake for most viewed content of all time.
LAST 30 DAYS
–79% first time users.
–27% get here from Google searches, and the Pacifican Onlince accounts for 3% (props to rhollen).
–We averaged 27 visitors a day (we have been a little down recently across the board).
–Nearly all of our users visit every day or every other day.
–Costa continues to rack up the points with the most poular article in the last 30 days.
KEYWORD FUN
Here are some of our most popular keywords that get people to vdov from search engines.
–emily wischow (these people also read a lot of pages at ~3 per visit)
–jash pictures
–vdov.net
–itsim+ion (these people are 85.3% nerds winning the %nerds per keyword category)
–”shawna hollen” | “shawna+hollen” | “richmond hollen” (the hollens have been blowing up all over the site recently)And from the weird one time hit bag
–free download hey willpower hundredaire
–cannibalism subtilis losick
–victoria hall naked
–”spinning bucket” lagrangian constraint volume
–andy panda knock knock
–quailman
–what are megayears
–nerdy comment
–stray light run existentialism on prom night lyrics
–”i hate mensa”
–how technology has affected badminton preformance
–emo sidebar (this has actually gotten 3 seperate hits in Dec 05 and Jan 06 and is probably my personal favorite)
–larry+taylor+irish+spring+soap+microwave
–r0><0r my b0><0rz (ahhh yes t3h l33t)
–rahmah bin jabir aljalahma
–e.coli and christmas and sweets
This is probably my favorite graph because it really gets to the heart of who our readers are. We have a lot of random hits from people who never come back, but we have even more from a small group of dedicated vdovers.
Thats all I have for now. Post any questions about our stats in the comments and I will answer them.
i have to say as the creator of vdov.net i’m glad that two of my posts grab the “most viewed” prize here.
Although after thinking about it you are probably not the “most viewed” rather your posts had the most comments. This is probably an artifact of the fact that we really only have one page and most readers just look at the main page. The only real reason to go to another page is to comment, meaning that pages with high comment levels have artificially high popularity. This is one of the arguments for “stubs” rather than full articles on the main page. Basically from the data we have and the way that the site is setup we have no real way of knowing how much articles are being read or skimmed. Still to have the most comments is a useful measure of one kind of popularity so bravo on that. But I don’t think we can officially give a “most viewed” or “most read” prize to anyone.
oh f that. whatever, i still take the prize. anyway yes i know everyone wants stubs, but i just dont have the time right now to write it up … wordpress is gloriously unhelpful with this, and i’d have to switch to a new theme or something. i do want to do that, and i have some prospects that i’ve been looking at (hemingway on wordpress, check it out) … but although they’re cool it would require some heavy customization on my part cause obviously i’m really ocd about the look and feel of vdov. who knows, i may get to it at some point, but right now i have two exams due next week (one 2 week long take home and one exam in a class for my advisor on mass spec) so i’m pretty swamped right now. plus a bunch of other stuff i have to get done in the next 2 weeks (including taxes, ugh, filing in 3 states SUUUUCKS). we’ll see how it plays out.
it’s not linux, it’s gnu/linux
How do people who only read the site through RSS/Atom feeds play in? I rarely actually visit vdov.net in a web browser, but get it through email via RSS. On the other hand, I hit the feed four times a day.
thats a good question. i’d have to say that since the code has to exist in the loaded page for it to hit analytics, feed hits are not recorded. this is a pretty major drawback, as i usually check the site using rss feeds as well. hmm … google, give me a solution.
*(after having looked through the feed, no, it isn’t recorded. crap … there must be a solution)*
on another note, note the uptime counter at the top of the page … that you won’t see with an rss reader.
Yeah I have realized after skimming through our data that there are really a lot of things that skew our data pretty badly. It doesn’t really matter that much but the single page and RSS feeds are the big ones. Also if you look at vdov’s Google PageRank it is 4 for http://www.vdov.net and only 2 for vdov.net
ha… to resurrect an old post. “emo sidebar” is apparently some kind of MMORPG software that has since gone the way of the dinosaur. Mystery explained.q