ThePickards Stats
It’s been a long time since I looked at my site statistics. So long, in fact, that when I came to look at them, I discovered that they didn’t work any more because my hosting providers (Titan Internet) had changed their stats package and hadn’t enabled the new one on my site because they didn’t think I used it any more.
But, inspired by a conversation with Paul, I decided to have a poke about to see what I could find: and thanks to Titan for sorting out my stats again so quickly.
So, if you’re interested in some of the stats from people viewing ThePickards (unless specifically stated, all stats relate to 1st Jan 2008 to 7th June 2008), read on. If not, don’t…
Searches
Top 5 search phrases:
- things beginning with a (509)
- thepickards (340)
- find madeleine (263)
- thanatophobia (261)
- cheap shoes (189)
Although I must give an honourable mention to “spiderman porn”, which as a search phrase apparently directed 95 visitors to my site — who I am rather presuming were sadly disappointed by what they found.
Google’s dominance of the market was confirmed: of the ~36,500 people directed to my site by search engines, about 32,500 of these were from Google…
Where are you?
One of the interesting things is looking to see where visitors come from. As a guess, I would have said that about 75% of my visitors were from the UK, with maybe 20% from the US, and the remaining 5% spread across everywhere else.
- UK (777,000 page views)
- US (316,000 page views)
- Non-Geo (57,000 page views)
- Ukraine (16,000 page views)
- Germany (13,000 page views)
Ukraine? That’s a surprising one. I’ve also had in the same time, 134 visits from Sudan, 16 visits from Zimbabwe, and 3 from Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (more commonly known as “Libya”). Well hello to you all. I’m surprised to find the spread of countries found in here…
What are you using?
Ignoring things identified as “unknown” or as bots or spiders of some description, what browsers are my visitors using?
- Internet Explorer 6 — 29.6% of visitors
- Firefox 2 — 26.8% of visitors
- Internet Explorer 7 — 20.9% of visitors
- Opera — 5.9% of visitors
- Internet Explorer 5.5 — 2.2% of visitors
In addition, the vast majority of you are on some sort of Windows XP platform, although there are some visitors from things like WebTV and even Windows 3.1.
It also appears that most of you came here directly; you either saved a bookmark or you typed in the URL: 80.3% of you weren’t ‘referred’, but the blog domains who were most successful in directing traffic to my site (irrespective of whether or not that was their intention!) were:
- 456 Berea Street
- Milan To Minsk
- Bruce Lawson (aka ‘The Great Duckano’)
- Scum Bus
- JB Visions
Scum Bus, in case you’re wondering, is a collection of posts/blogs which reference Lothian Buses in some way, and someone submitted a blog posts I had written complaining about Lothian buses to it…
It’s worth pointing out that blogs on blogspot, blogger, wordpress etc are are lumped together on this report and so I have left them off. I’m also surprised that the University of Minnesota has referred more than a hundred people to my site (ahah! It appears stuff I”ve written has been referenced in their Web Design newsletter).
Visitor Numbers
On average since 1st January, I’ve had 2,532 visitors per day. I am deliberately using the ‘visitors’ column as I think this gives a better idea than looking at either page views or hits.
This is a rather pitiful number in comparison to some of the more famous bloggers, but as I’m writing primarily for my own entertainment, it’s nice to know that there are obviously a few others who want to read my site too…
What is interesting though is that while on a normal week it’s relatively steady: between 2,100 and 2,900 visitors every day (slightly more during the week than on a weekend) — there are certain ‘anomalous days’. 8th April 2008 saw 3,800 visitors… when my blog post for that day was talking about the new series of Dr. Who. I presume therefore that I was being referenced elsewhere on that day unless people really were desperate to find out what I thought of the adipose…
Another thing that is quite interesting is that if I’m averaging more than 2,500 visitors per day (even accounting for the fact that a significant proportion of these will be spammers), that means I’ve got an awful lot of readers who I don’t know about, because they obviously keep very quiet. Obviously some of them (e.g. people I used to work with with the initials ‘DM’ (’DRM’?)) I know personally and so they would tell me that they’d been reading my site, but there must still be a lot of you out there that I don’t know about.
…so feel free to say hello!
Hello. I am 
Maybe you should organize a de-lurking-day