Comments on: Website Statistics

By: David Bruce Murray

David Bruce Murray — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:41:30 +0000

The more traffic a site generates, the more interested advertisers are in giving you money. It really is that simple.

By: Daniel J. Mount

Daniel J. Mount — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:15:50 +0000

Good advice – very, very good advice.

By: GospelMusicFan

GospelMusicFan — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:48:14 +0000

What’s more important for advertising purposes?
The numbers of hits or the numbers of favorable impressions of a website by the viewers.
Maybe it is all the more reason to being careful where little fingers go on the keyboard while posting on a site.

By: Daniel J. Mount

Daniel J. Mount — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 18:50:33 +0000

That’s interesting. I’m not sure I know how to program those options in Wordpress – or in fact if those options can indeed be programmed.

By: David Bruce Murray

David Bruce Murray — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 18:47:05 +0000

I limit my main page to displaying the ten most recent posts, by the way…I’m not entirely sure if that’s the best thing. I’ll probably change it so that it shows posts from the past week or so, regardless of how many posts that happens to be at any given time.

With two regular frequent contributors to the site and two that post rarely, it’s possible for posts to get bumped off the main page in just three or four days at times, especially when Daniel Britt and I are both in “high output” mode.

By: David Bruce Murray

David Bruce Murray — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 18:03:13 +0000

The ideal measurement would be a clock that can add up the hours viewers spend gazing at our respective sites and can tell whether a reader gets up from the computer to go the bathroom while a page is loaded and deduct for that.

Maybe we could convince our readers to have thought recorders installed in their brains to measure how much they think about us, whether they’re at their computers or not…then we’d really know for sure. )

By: Daniel J. Mount

Daniel J. Mount — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:55:32 +0000

You make very good points. I guess the ideal (from my perspective) would be to track total number of IP addresses visiting a site in a month, counting also the number of times they come. The ideal from your perspective might be to have a way of counting how many posts each visitor reads.

As it currently stands, on both your site and mine, a visitor can read the last week or two of posts on one page view. They might read just the current post, or they might spend a half-hour and read the last twenty. That is the main reason I’m not completely satisfied with the page view method.

By: David Bruce Murray

David Bruce Murray — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:51:52 +0000

My March figures for unique visits are 38,605 (1245/day).

I personally feel page views are the most accurate measure to use for comparison. If a person visits a site today and then comes back again in a separate viewing session, they inflate the unique visitor stat for the overall period being measured. Obviously, you, Doug and I have a number of repeat visitors who check our sites every few days if not daily, yet our stats indicate ratios that range from 1.4:1 in your case to 2:1 in Doug’s. Mine run in between at 1.6 pages per visit or so. I know the actual ratio of page views to truly unique visitors has to be much higher than those figures indicate, because my recent stats for SGHistory.com bear this out.

Also, I think a person who spends more time at a site is more valuable as a visitor (and potential consumer, since I sell ads on my site) than someone who just loads one page and leaves.

Of course, I don’t consider “hits” (which count for every single element on a page, including graphics) to be any sort of accurate measurement at all.