Website Statistics

Posted Tue, 06/24/2008 - 20:29 by aravind

I have always been curious about my site visitors. Who is visiting my site? Why were they visiting? From where did they get to know about my site? Did they get here from a search engine and Do I really have this many real visitors to my site etc. are some of the questions that I ask myself. Today I decided to dissect my website statistics to know more about my visitors.

Unique Visitors

2004

Not a lot in this year. Except me no one visited.

2005

2006

Early 2006 was when I started learning CSS. Had hard coded HTML website styled using CSS. In March or April I installed Wordpress. From then on the stats began to grow gradually and eventually reaching 1000 unique visits per month by the end of December.

2007

Early 2007 I kinda stopped blogging since I had my thesis defence. My visit to India also hurt my stats. I guess I was still using Wordpress then. My Europe trip did not help my stats either. The unique visits dropped to a yearly low of 1500 visits (which was still greater than the previous years highest). Once I came back I started using Drupal and began to blog more consistently resulting in a lot of unique visits.

2008

From February through June of this year I did not blog at all and as a result my site visits did not grow at the same rate as it did during the end of last year. But now it seems to pick-up again.

I have come a long way since 2004. From less than 10 visits for a whole year to almost 275 unique visits a day, I can't even imagine that my site is having these numbers. If I think that 275 humans visit my website daily then I would be terribly wrong. One has to look deeper to really find out how many of these visits were bots and how many were by humans.

Browser Type

2005

With less than 100 unique visits for the year I am pretty sure that most of the traffic to my site were from me. Surprisingly 13 % were from Yahoo robot. I don't even remember that I submitted my site to Yahoo for indexing.

2006

Close to 70% of the traffic for that year was from bots and 25% (1500 visits) from humans. 12% of 2006 unique visits were using Internet Explorer as their browser and 13% were with other browsers. I am not sure how much of that was me. We can check it by looking at the internet provider.

2007

Almost 75% traffic to my site was due to robots. Damn bots. About 23% were humans (11385 unique visits). In this year I was using Linux completely so any visit from Internet explorer cannot to counted towards my visit. 15% of the browsers were non Internet Explorers and 8% were Internet Explorer. Definitely my visitors are geeks or at least tech savvy.

2008

So far this year 72% were robots, 14% (7000) by Internet Explorer users, 11% (5500) Mozilla users. Until now 12500 unique human visitors have seen my website.

Now the question is how often did I visit my own website.

Internet Provider

2005

Out of the 100 odd visitors to my site I visited almost 25 times evident from the okstate.edu domain. 3 visitors were from the US evident from cox.net provider and possibly it might have been myself (I had cable for a while in 2005).

2006

Most of the human visitor to my site were from okstate.edu and I bet 95% would have been me. Out of the possible 1500 unique visitors if 516 were from okstate.edu domain then less than 1000 unique visitors had visited my site in 2006.

2007

Out of the possible 11385 (from the browser information) only 720 were from okstate.edu. So most of the 12000 unique visits were from someone else. Ha I have to take into account my trip to Europe and India. At worst 6000 visits were by someone else other than me. That is a good number. In 2007 I had google adsense on my site and that may be the reason why google robot had almost 20000 unique visits (a staggering 2 visits each hour).

2008

Out of the possible 12500 unique visitors so far only 211 were from okstate.edu. I have been in Stillwater almost all the time this year so I can safely say that almost 12000 unique visits were not because of me. Clearly after removing adsense a significant reduction in the googlebot visits is evident. It was unable to identify internet providers for 35% of my visitors; may be its because these visits were by humans from everywhere in the world. So I can say with some degree of confidence that I had 10000 unique visitors so far this year. But how many individuals have visited? Am I getting new visitors or a few of them are visiting again and again? These are some of the questions that are difficult to answer. I may be able to answer using a different analysis software.