Friday, October 28, 2011

BLOG STATS - What the hell is going on?

 Most weekdays this blog enjoys around 1800-2000 visitors a day with about half that number at weekends so last holiday weekend for example the visitor numbers were
Saturday - 919
Sunday   - 798
Monday  - 969
On Tuesday and Wednesday they reverted to the usual sort of numbers , 1831 and 2036, but then yesterday something extraordinary happened - the blog had 4787 visitors! This is the third or fourth biggest day since I started the blog and for the life of me I cannot work out what it was that caused the sudden upsurge. There was nothing controversial at all on the blog and yet...................
Thanks anyway to all of you. I'm chuffed.
Bookman Beattie

8 comments:

Jacqueline Howett said...

You deserve it- you put a lot of effort into this great blog!

Have a great week!

transpress nz said...

Rugby World Cup parties?

Mark Hubbard said...

When I ran my blog, before a Friday night bottle of wine lost the whole venture to the ether ;), I had a run like that over a single day when my stat's completely blew out. Looking into it, they were just about all page views from the single country, Ukraine, which previously I was getting only one or two page views a day from (as well as one brave sole from China). The only link I could see was that I'd renamed the blog to 'Life Behind the IRon Drape', so perhaps it was a social studies course or something.

Though, a couple of Russian looking women then appeared on my Twitter :) I've never followed them because, being a bit of a prude, I don't think bikinis are really appropriate for Twitter.

Anyway, did you have a spike from any single country that was out of the normal?

World of the Written Word said...

A book publicist told me the other day that your blog is the first thing booksellers turn to after turning on the shop computer in the morning. Lots of kind things were said about you in that conversation, including your unfailing generosity -- the tips of your ears should have been bright pink! Your popularity is very well deserved.

On a practical note: If you go to "stats" in blogger (on the design page), it will tell you what posts have been most popular. Let me know -- I'm curious!

David Howard said...

Like other readers I'm delighted that the blog is enjoying increased
support.
While I'm not claiming to have caused all of the spike in visits, I did post a link to your story about the Pepys Prize for the Robert Boyle biography to a colleague who is a prominent international philosopher and contributes to the journal 'Nature' and the contact list for that alone is in the hundreds, including professional scientific and philosophical discussion groups that, again, have hundreds of members... Concentric circles.; he sent it on, in turn, to the biography's author - who may, justifiable pride being what it is, have sent it on again... The timeframe fits because most recipients would be visiting
a day late (as it were). Of course, all of this might be coincidence.

Alessandra said...

Ciao Graham,

for what I can understand the Blogger statistics are not numbers of visitors but page views (i.e. same visitor reading different posts) and I get moments like that too, it may be when Blogger itself or another automated web service scan your posts, the go through a lot in little time thus increasing the page view numbers 2 or 3 times, usually over 3 days.

Best thing is to find out where the page views are from: if there are too many from the US or from a country where you don't get visitors (lets say 468 views from ... Albania) then you know that it is a 'robot' working.

If most of the visits are from NZ and your usual places (?) in that case you can almost pinpoint them to where they came from and why.

Add a little free gadget like the globe (I have one on my blog that you can click on and paste on yours) or a free counter and those will give you the number of visitors rather than page views. Or get a Live Traffic Feed (that too is at the end of my blog, it has all the flags of the visiting countries and can tell if visitors are from Chch or Wellington, and if they came through another website or link, at what time, for how long, and on what computer...) you can click and add your own for free), . None of these is probably 100% accurate, as geeks can remove themselves from these feeds, but having two different ones, (for me the globe and the Live Traffic Feed) plus the Blogger's page view numbers, will give you more info to work with.

Anyway, it is always nice to see the stats going up, yesterday I had my highest ever as well (coincidence?), almost 1000 when I am usually around the 600/700 per day, not as many as you get of course, but I am very happy with it :-).

Ciao
Alessandra

Beattie's Book Blog said...

Many thanks for the kind comments.
Alessandra I use a stats tracking service called Stat Counter and these numbers I have quoted are actual visitors, not pageloads.The pageloads are very much higher.

Beattie's Book Blog said...

Friday at 10.00am and things are a little more normal today although I have already had 600 visitors which is good for a Friday, traditionally the quietest weekday for me in terms of visitor numbers.