Ben Best's Blog

Last year I believed that traffic on my website had peaked in 2007. But 2010 exceeded the previous few years in number of unique sessions, according to Urchin:

2007: 1,548,099

2008: 1,505,117

2009: 1,483,335

2010: 1,744,189

The pattern of website hits climbing gradually from August to December was not repeated in 2010, as distinct from the previous few years. In 2010 peak activity was in October:

______2009_______2010

Sept__122,079____145,345

Oct___145,846____159,538

Nov___148,209____153,481

Dec___155,701____143,629

In December 2010 my website had a 3-month average world ranking of about 300,000, compared to about 230,000 in December 2009, and about 170,000 in December 2008. In December 2010 my USA 3-month average ranking was about 130,000 compared to about 90,000 in December 2009. But on October 17, 2010 my USA ranking was about 73,000.

My The History of Christmas page was responsible for increasing my late Fall hits considerably in the past, but was less influential in 2010. Googling "history of Christmas", "the history of Christmas", and "Christmas history" still shows my webpage on the first page of Google, but the ranking is not as high. In 2009 my The History of Christmas page peaked at 1,312 hits on December 15, but in 2010 it peaked at 1,110 hits on December 24. Possibly there was enough of an increase in home computers in 2010 to make home sources exceed school sources for the first time.

Around March 2010 I began tracking pages on my website with Google Analytics as well as with Urchin. A visual inspection of visits to my website on Google Analytics in the Fall of 2010 indicates a series of "hills", where each "hill" corresponds to hits over 4,000 daily on weekends and under 4,000 on weekends (especially Saturdays, less drop on Fridays and Sundays). The general trend is upward to mid-October and fairly level (though slightly downward) to mid-December. The peak in October was Monday, October 18 with 5,225 hits (not an extreme variance from the following days). The second half of December was mostly below 3,000 hits per day, with the exception of Monday, December 27, which had 7,934 hits. For December 27, 5,865 of those hits were to the single webpage Is Longevity Entirely Hereditary? , which according to Urchin were nearly all from the bing.com search engine. There was no special spike from google.com searches on that day. Usually, a "one-day wonder" for one of my webpages is the result of some blog or newspaper article mentioning the page, so it is mysterious to me that a "one-day wonder" for a webpage would come from a particular search engine.

Google Analytics recorded about a million visitors to my website in the last ten months of 2010 from 222 countries. The only countries obviously missing were North Korea, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, French Guiana, and some African countries. On a percentage basis, my source of visits was:

United States 60.8%

Canada 7.8%

United Kingdom 7.1%

Australia 4.2%

India 3.9%

Philippines 2.3%

Germany 1.3%

Malaysia 1.1%

Singapore 0.8%

New Zealand 0.7%

According to Google Analytics, the average time spent on one of the pages of my website was 41 seconds. But 13,785 pages were listed. I only have about 190 pages on my website, so the count must be including every graphic, of which there are many (but not that many). Time spent on the more popular pages, however, is more in the range of 3 to 6 minutes. Below are the percent popularities and time spent on my most popular pages according to Google Analytics. I have converted number of unique pageviews into percentages based on an estimation of one million visitors in the last ten months of 2010. This means 197,724 unique page views become 20% of total visits. (You have
to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger)

Webpage Percent and Time Spent

Webpage	Percent	Min:Sec
Causes of Death	20%	4:51
Brain Neurotransmitters	13%	4:59
Death by Murder	13%	5:01
The History of Christmas	3%	4:56
The Uses of Financial Statements	3%	5:26
Brain Areas Supporting Cerebral Cortex Function	3%	2:39
Figuring the Odds (Probability Puzzles)	2%	8:52
Mechanisms of Aging	2%	4:20
Basic Cerebral Cortex Function Other than Vision	2%	1:52
The Amygdala and the Emotions	2%	3:51
Melatonin	2%	4:35
Is Caffeine a Health Hazard?	2%	3:59
Fats You Need — Essential Fatty Acids	2%	3:54
Does Excess Protein Cause Kidney Damage?	2%	5:00
Alcohol — Health Benefit or Hazard?	2%	4:22
N-AcetylCysteine (NAC)	2%	3:56
Phytochemicals as Nutraceuticals	1%	2:43
Lessons for Cryonics from Metallurgy and Ceramics	1%	3:01
Perfusion & Diffusion in Cryonics Protocol	1%	1:49

# posted by Ben Best @ 6:34 AM