Who reads this blog
July 24th, 2009 at 11:53 am (Technology, Web)
StatPress is a WordPress plugin that tracks site visitors and which pages they visit. Over the past couple of months, I’ve learned that this site gets 1000+ visitors each month (not necessarily unique) plus about 5000 visits from spiders (!). On April 22, there were 474 visitors in a single day. Slow world news day, perhaps?
Who are these visitors, and what do they come to see?
In aggregate, visitors to this site use:
- Operating system: Windows XP dominates the list, at about 50% of visits. It is followed by Mac OS X (17%), Windows Vista (15%), and Debian (9%). I’ve also had 3 visits from a BlackBerry, 1 from WebTV, and 1 from something called Symbian.
- Browser: Firefox 3 handily tops the list (36%), followed by IE 6 (20%) and IE 7 (19%). Next is Iceweasel (9%), which is a rebranded version of Firefox.
It’s fascinating to browse the search terms people typed that led them to my blog. The ten most recent were:
- what did i learn in psychology class
- touch sensitive dimmer stuck on
- what i learned today blog
- touch lamp won’t turn off
- Basketweave knit pattern
- what I learned today
- Reverse Corte
- problems with touch lamps
- indent négatif latex
- how much baking powder to add?
And overall, the most visited pages are:
- Why my touch-lamp won’t turn off
- How to make LaTeX use a hanging indent
- The entire category of Psychology posts (hey, my sister is the psychologist, not me!)
Any other favorites?
In addition to people-visits, this site also sees a lot of spiders. Interestingly, although referrals from google dominate all other search engines, I see many more spider visits from yahoo. Could it be that google has a more efficient spidering strategy, requiring fewer visits? Or yahoo is more fond of my site? We may never know. I also learned about search engines I’d never heard of, including Moreover, Naver (South Korea), Searchme (a “visual search engine” that just went offline today due to lack of venture capital), and Radian6.
Judson said,
July 24, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I’m curious as to why I don’t show up in your OS statistics – should be Gentoo. I know for certain that it shows up in my User-Agent string and everything. :)
Susan said,
July 24, 2009 at 7:00 pm
That’s awesome. I think we need this plugin. I fear that we will learn that nobody actually visits our blog :). At least we’ll get the warm fuzzy of ~5000 spider hits/month.
Two of that list of 10 search terms are pretty clearly people who already know the blog but had forgotten the URL. Three of them are your diagnostic post about touch lamps. Clearly you are doing the websphere a favor! And I don’t mean that entirely lightly. These days when I have an obscure problem like that, I do exactly what they’re doing — I enter an English language phrase into Google to find who else in the big wide Internet world had the same problem. And this brings me to a solution about 80% of the time. It’s so frequent that I’m a little freaked out when the search turns up nothing. It indicates that I’m trying something so strange that *gasp* nobody has managed to blog about yet!
The baking powder post is also a great world service. I’m surprised there aren’t more search phrases leading to that one.
wkiri said,
July 25, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Judson: I don’t see an entry for Gentoo, but there is one for generic “Linux”; maybe that’s you? :)
Susan: I love the idea of “warm fuzzies” from spiders ;) Note that the list of search terms were the most recent 10, not the most common 10. The top 10 are similar to that list, though::
So, 5 about the touch lamp, 3 about hanging indents in latex, and two more generic (do people really search on “today”… and end up at my blog?). With time, maybe the baking powder one will creep up there. :)
If you end up adding StatPress, let us know the results!
Terran said,
July 26, 2009 at 1:35 am
Just added/activated StatPress on our blog. (Actually, successor to SP — development seems to have switched hands, informally.) More info as we find out more… :-)
Heuristics Inc. said,
July 30, 2009 at 11:31 am
On Google vs. Yahoo, I see the same results – Yahoo’s spider visited 1926 times this month compared to Google’s 802. Google got used 11741+1910+949+410+109 times vs. Yahoo’s 325. My top search string:
“song ideas”.
Something called YodaoBot is generating 30415 hits… who the heck is that? Hmm, Chinese webcrawler. Obviously seeking too many times.
-bill
PS All this is re: my own website and Analog stats package, not WordPress.