Sunday, January 01, 2006
2005 Statistics for BENBEST.COM
(I have tried to format these tables nicely, but this Blogger is VERY unfriendly
to HTML, so it looks a mess. And a vast amount of space appears between the tables.)
I get statistics on my website
(www.benbest.com) from two independent sources: Superstats
and Urchin. I get slightly different kinds of information from both sources
(and there are sources of error on both sources), but where there is
agreement I believe that the data is reliable.
There were over a million unique sessions on my website in 2005 and
each session visited an average of one-and-a-half pages -- for a total
of about a million-and-a-half PageViews for 2005. I believe that the
average time spent on a page is between 3−4 minutes, but I also
believe that a very high proportion of PageViews is less than 30 seconds.
Just because a page is loaded does not mean it is being read. It may
stay loaded over lunch or dinner.
A table below shows how many thousands of sessions there were
on my website for the months of 2005. Another table below shows how
many PageViews I got as a result of some of the most common search
phrases on all the search engines giving me more than 100 hits
during December of 2005.
About three quarters of the hits I get on my website come from people
doing searches with search engines -- and the overwhelming majority
of these are combinations of words that produce fewer than 100
PageViews per month. All of the data may be understated because I have heard
that some ISPs like AOL do caching of websites, so I would not record
many AOL hits (actually I never see AOL as a source in my statistics).
In December 2005 I had 44,000 hits on my
The History of Christmas page, more than a quarter
of all the PageViews on my entire website. I had approximately 175 pages
on my website in December 2005. The number of PageViews on the
Christmas page peaked at nearly 3,000 on December 20 and fell
precipitously thereafter (especially after December 25th). I typically
get less than 200 PageViews per month on the Christmas page during
the summer. Aside from December, November and January, the Christmas
page is not usually very high on my list of pages. During the
beginning of December 2005 I was getting over 40,000 sessions
per week, with nearly 100 pages on my website getting at least
100 weekly PageViews. (Saturday is always the slowest day, whereas
the busiest could be Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.)
Aside from the Christmas page, my
Death by Murder,
Brain Neurotransmitters
and
Causes of Death webpages get the most hits, but
these are not among my own favorites. I pay most careful attention
to the number of PageViews and the numerical trends in PageViews
of my favorite pages. Pages become my favorites on the basis of
how much work I put into them, on the basis of how pleased I am
with the content and on the basis of how much I would
like them to make an impact on the minds of other people.
Here are my SuperStats comparisons of the
PageViews I got in December 2004 and December 2005 for
some of my favorite pages (you have to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger):
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