3.1415926535 897932
Published January 7, 2006 | 
Oh he love, he love, he love
He does love his numbers
And they run, they run, they run him
In a great big circle
In a circle of infinity – bush
Did you ever wonder how many people visit a website each day? Well, it can be millions of course if you’re talking about Amazon! For the rest of the world we can be looking at anywhere from tens of thousands to 3 lonely people at 4 in the morning. It’s hard to tell. Even though folks often think we can track every breath a visitor takes, we can’t. Heck even the numbers we can get from our statistical logs and programs is never really right. So many factors are just too “iffy”. So website owners have to come to terms with what they are seeing. Here’s a good example. I had one website running with 2 different stats programs. They both worked correctly and read the same raw data. One program (LiveStats) said the site had 1400 or so visitors a day. The other program (Urchin) said 430 a day!!!!! Ok, that’s wild. (Now let me tell the tech guys right off, that I can think of 107 reasons for this, worked the issues, contacted the experts, and found reliable answers) Thing is, both programs were correct using their own method of looking at that data. So what do you do as the site owner? Believe the big number? Create an average? Well, being that I’m a Charlie Brown kind of guy I keep using the program that quoted the 430! I don’t want to lie. But I also know the truth lies somewhere in the middle! So how does Urchin see KayakWisconsin.net?Here is an (urchin lowballed) cold accountant’s eye view of the last year at KayakWisconsin.net, from Jan 1, to Dec 31 of 2005;
Summary
- Visitor Sessions: 55,186
- Total Page Views: 357, 680
- Total Hits: 1,318,807*
- Average 977 page views per day
- Average visit is over 4.2 minutes
* For “non” web people “hits” is a false term in that it counts every file downloaded. Think about it this way, If a webpage has one picture and someone looks at it, it would count as 2 hits. One for the page & one for the picture. So what then if the page had 5 images? That’s 6 hits, yet still only one person saw one page. It just get’s more inflated from there. . .What if a person looked at 2 pages with 10 pictures on each page? You can see how over time this number gets crazy. So we always look for “Visitor Sessions” or “Unique Visitors”. Never “Hits”.
Top 10 Pages (by views)
- Kayak Wisconsin Homepage (viewed 39,166 times)
- Blog Homepage*
- Personal Kayak Pictures
- Water Trail Index
- Free Kayak Wallpaper Page
- Kayak Video Page
- Blogs & Journals Listings
- Paddling Places
- Site Map
- Great Lakes Water Trails
* People come into the blog (as the rest of the site) from all over the place so it’s really tough to get daily numbers. Meaning that while maybe 70% of visitors to the blog each day come to the main page, another 30% did a web search and came into the blog through the archives and not directly via the main page. So you have to do some math. (which by the way, I Hate!!) I can estimate that over 300 visitors read a blog post each day, but not necessarily from the main page.
Top 10 Blog Posts (by views)
- The Freya Underground
- Learning To Fly
- Qajaq Training Camp (by Alex Pak)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Kayaking Rabbits?
- PFD’s & Revolutions
- Rugged Western Shores
- Dry Wit or Wet Suit
- Stupid Kayak Tricks
- Hey Moto, is there anybody out there?
- Watership Down
Most Viewed Galleries
- BCU Week, Tybee Island 2005
- Canoecopia 2005
- Lake Michigan Ice
- Door County Sea Kayak Symposium
- Kayak Weekend 2005
Most Popular Video
Keith W. doing his now infamous “Lumberjack Roll” It was watched over 4,477 times!
Most Popular Handout
Easily the Hypothermia Table followed by “Symtoms of Hypothermia“.
More About You!
- over 73% of visitors just come to the site via bookmark or typing the name in directly. 11% come from search engines. All other individual referral/link account for less that 0.6% of the total traffic.
- Visitors have stopped by from over 70 countries. Mostly US, UK, & Canada, with a good number from Israel, Netherlands, Germany, Australia & NZ, Sweden, Denmark & Norway as well.
All in all it’s pretty amazing to me. I hope we can keep finding new things to talk about!!!
So there’s the numbers. Now I’ve got to go load the boat. . .
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2 Responses to 3.1415926535 897932
1.318.807 hits in a year! Very good results!
Someday you should let us know about some funny or weird access queries to your site.
Hey Wenley! Feeling better?
Yesterday one query was:
“im going kayaking tomarrow how do i avoid falling in”
That’s pretty funny!
People found the site using over 3,500 search terms producing 6,700 sessions. Oddly the no. 1 search was “phonic alphabet” followed by a whole bunch of varients of “kayak wisconsin” and “Free Kayak something. (wallpaper, screensaver. ..) “
“Freya Hoffmeister” was no. 11 for the year.
Some of the odd or “OT” searches were
- hot sexy
- funny christmas salutations
- wassily kandisnsky (who is this??)
- sally field nude (are they kidding!?)
- www a real swell smell.net
Oh and there was that fun one “greenlander naked sex” I’m sure there were more but I only had the attention span to scroll through the first 700 or so!