March 10th, 2009, 15 Comments »
Something else kind of stuck in my brain from Stephen Hume’s column. His claim that the Vancouver Sun had received 10 million page views in February, 2009 seemed unusually high.
Warning: This post gets pretty web-analytics-geeky very quickly, so bail out now if that doesn’t interest.
I checked out the Sun’s online advertising site. According to their downloadable PDF, these were the traffic numbers for May, 2008:
vancouversun.com
7.2 million monthly page views to vancouversun.com
522,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on vancouversun.com
theprovince.com
3.7 million monthly page views to theprovince.com
391,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on theprovince.com
There’s some fine print at the bottom of the page which indicates that the page view numbers come from (the links are mine) “Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, Avg. May 2008″ and the visitor numbers come from “Source: comScore Media Metrix, Total Canada, Home & Work, May 2008″.
Analytics and Panels
I take an interest in those sources because Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a more accurate visitor total than comScore. SiteCatalyst is an analytics-based tool like Google Analytics, and if it’s counting page views, then it’s counting visitors, too. Like any such ‘web-bug’ system, VancouverSun.com has code on every page that enables them to capture and report on behaviour for each of their site visitors. I grabbed a screenshot of that code from a page on the Sun’s website.
Read more…
15 Comments »
February 16th, 2009, 6 Comments »
Jules recently posted about her web stats. They tell her, among many other things, that she still has one or more readers who are still on Windows 3.1 (originally released on March 18, 1992). I thought I’d check the stats for this site for the same very, very late adopter. No such luck–the oldest visitors that my Google Analytics account shows are on Windows 95 (two of them in the last month, as it happens).
Then I thought to check what percentage of Windows users are using Vista, and what fraction is still on Windows XP. Windows Vista was released a little over two years ago, on January 30, 2007. It has, as I’m sure you’re well aware, been plagued by criticism. I know many XP users who will skip Vista entirely, moving straight to Windows 7 (as of yet, it has no slicker name).
I checked this site, as well as a client’s site (they’re in the software industry). I compared Windows XP and Vista usage for January, 2008 and January, 2009. Here’s what I found:
For this site, as a percentage of all visitors on Windows:
| |
XP |
Vista |
| January, 2008 |
80% |
15% |
| January, 2009 |
66% |
31% |
For a client site, as a percentage of all visitors on Windows:
| |
XP |
Vista |
| January, 2008 |
81% |
13% |
| January, 2009 |
74% |
21% |
Those numbers don’t add up to 100% because there’s a fraction of users on Windows 2000, NT, CE, 98, 95, ME and so forth.
I checked a couple of other sites, and the numbers look more like my client’s site than my own. Vista usage floats around the 25% mark for January, 2009. What should the adoption rate look like? I really have no idea. Microsoft surely hoped that a majority of their users would be on Windows Vista by the time they released Windows 7.
6 Comments »
June 19th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I used to really obsess over my web stats. I’ve managed to reduce that obsession to a casual curiosity, focussed almost entirely on who’s linking to me. That makes it sound like a popularity contest. In truth, it’s more that I’ve just exhausted any interest in knowing how many people found this site by searching for “cheeses of nazareth” in the last month (13, in case you were curious).
I’m most interested in the linkers because they represent actual, knowable humans who have opinions and perspectives. So, the ‘stats’ engine I check most regularly is Technorati, followed by occasional peaks at HitTail. I’ve emailed the folks at HitTail asking for a setting that enables me to filter out all of the search engine traffic from their results. But that’s basically the opposite of their messaging, so I doubt they’ll go for it.
Having recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.4 (I know, I know), I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of desktop widgets. I’m not using anything particularly out of the ordinary–currency converter, weather, FTP and so forth.
I’d like a widget that talks to Google Analytics or HitTail or whoever, and shows a real-time stream of visitors and their source URLs (and enables me to filter out all the search engine noise). Maybe one already exists, but I haven’t been able to find it.
Which widgets do you use regularly and love?
UPDATE: You know, I just looked at my web stats–specifically the most popular keywords that searchers used to find this site. I observed an interesting trend: comparing the top fifty keywords from May, 2006 to May, 2007, only one keyword appears in both lists. What can we attribute that to? My short attention span? The Google dance?
4 Comments »
May 8th, 2007, 3 Comments »
You know, I always had mixed feelings about Google Analytics. I liked the quality of the data they captured–it always seemed more realiable than other services–but I came to dislike the interface. It ran really slow on my laptop, and presented my data in some peculiar ways.
Happily, Google has just launched a new version of their stats package, and it looks way better. From the Google Analytics blog:
We’ve redesigned the reporting interface for greater customization and collaboration. This should make it easier for businesses and website owners to find and share the data you need to make informed decisions. The new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you can look at a single report to gain insights rather than having to pull up several reports to understand what action to take.
You can take a tour to check out the new features and interface. Also, Andy Beal has an in-depth look at the new version on Marketing Pilgrim.
UPDATE: Hmmm…spoke too soon. Either there’s an interface bug for Firefox on OS X, or my three-year old PowerBook is too slow. The new app errors out when I click the little down arrow beside the date to modify the date range.
3 Comments »
