|
Web Site Usage Statistics
As you are reading this, you are among the 46 other people who will do so each day this month. Not this particular page but the Beacon Villages site in general. This fact and a few others that you will read here is, of course, an average. It is also, like all statistics, subject to a few provisos.
When this site first began, as south-zeal.co.uk, back in June 2003, I started using a free statistical service, which provided details about who visits the site, in exchange for a button, advertising them, on the site’s first page. Sometime between August and September, they had problems and disappeared for a while. When they came back, all our site history was gone and I had, in the meantime, looked at some very simple figures, provided free by the firm the site uses for its server. What was noticeable, was a large discrepancy between the figures that they gave and those I had been given by the free site, so I decided to pay for a stats collection service, in the hope that this might be more accurate.
I now have four sets of statistics for the months October 2003 to January 2004. (I have had to estimate the last couple of days for January to get this into print by Feb 1st!) What has become clear is that there are some unknowns and a fair degree of complexity when trying to discover, not just how many people are looking at the site, but also where they are from, what they are looking at and how they are doing it. This being said, the following data are as close as I can get.
The number of ‘sessions’ (i.e. people logging on to the site) were:
October - 1383, November - 1694, December - 1181 & January - 1408. This is an average of 1416 a month (46 a day)and, with an average time logged on of 2 minutes 9 seconds; this means the site is being looked at, somewhere by someone, for an average of 1 hour 40 minutes each day.
Analysis of where the site visitors come from gives UK - 34% , USA - 27% , unknown origin - 23% ,Australia - 6% ,Europe – 5% ,Rest – 5%. The high unknown figure is probably made up partly by search engine robots which are constantly updating their own information. Interestingly Ecuador provides more hits than Canada and January saw a large rise of sessions from the United Arab Emirates. There are also hits from India, China, Japan and Korea.
In a session, 57% look at one page only, 38% look at between 2 and 6 pages and 5% look at more than 6 pages. 77% are on the site for less than 2 minutes whilst 23% look at it for over 2 minutes – in the most recent month 8 for over half an hour and three for over an hour!
It is harder to tell what pages people are looking at because the stats only give the most popular and the least popular pages each month, rather than the exact number of hits each page gets. All I have been able to establish is the obvious – the ‘Welcome page’ is the most looked at followed by the Photo Album, the Village Monthly Reports and the News Items, in that order. Again an odd fact in that the Chinese New Year pop up in January was very well used. What makes these usage statistics harder to follow is the fact that, each month, it is probably a different News Item that is popular, whereas, for example, the page on a particular village or facility might get more hits consistently, month on month, without ever getting into the ‘most popular’ category.
Finally, a technical bit. It is useful for me to know what computer Operating System and what Internet Browser most people are using, so that the site will reach its audience. Whilst my stats can’t tell what Operating System is being used by 40% of our visitors, it does show that, of the rest, 99.3% use Windows – 37% using Windows 98, 35% using XP and 27.7% using other versions of Windows. As for Browsers, 34% are using IE6, 24% use IE5, 20% are using other versions or other Browsers whilst the unknown is 22%.
And conclusions? I don’t know why you should be interested, if at all. If the site gives you what you want, that’s all you may need to know. For me, I do it as a hobby. If it satisfies me, why should I care if anyone else looks at it? The answer is, ‘I don’t know, but it does! It must be rather like being a gardener and entering for the local show. It does matter if other people think your marrow is the best. Or, if you put on a local amateur dramatic show, you do care how many tickets you sell. I could put up a personal web site, if, for example, I just wanted to display my photographs, but that is not what I work at the site for. The aims of this web site are as stated below. I am proud of the place where I live and want to share it with others. Obviously, the more people who see it, the better. I will keep trying to make improvements and watching the statistics to see if this brings the Beacon Villages area to the attention of more people. If it doesn’t, then I will need to decide, if it is worth all the effort.
|
