21 January 2012

The fall in review

A quick check of visitors statistics show that from September 1st to December 1st one of my old blogs got much of the site's traffic. A post called Hiking Manhattan, Part 1 from 2008 was suddenly very popular. In October it accounted for a quarter of all of the traffic on the blog.  When I looked it over, I saw that it was just photos from from that year's hike tip-to-tip of Manhattan. But I was puzzled how search engines and visitors might get so excited since it has very little text.  At least I was puzzled until I saw two of the photos.  Can you spot them?


Here is a graph of traffic for Sept, Oct, Nov showing the sudden popularity and then unpopularity of this entry.  The absolute highest peak was October 14th when it got over 400 hits.

4 comments:

Bill Wolfe said...

I assume all the hits were viewing Zucotti park photos.

BtW, I am a Luddite - I can use Google analytics to generate the same blog statistics, but how did you copy and paste that into a post like that?

Bill Wolfe said...

I just checked my stats for the year. I have a very consistent pattern of 175-200 visitors per day (weekdays), which drops off significantly over the weekend to lows of 50-75 range. Obviously, my target audience is viewing my site from work (dominate locale is Trenton, as to be expected)..

The visible peaks for the year, my 2 highest days were 305 (on 9/16/11) and 225 on 12/6/11.

Similar to how your traffic spiked likely due to interest in Zuccotti (maybe found via search engine), my two highest topics could have been triggered by key words.

On 9/16, the post was titled "Christie Bowing to Koch Brothers on RGGI" - both Koch Brothers and RGGI are hot words.

On 12/6, my topic was "Occupy Pompton lakes" - again, a hot word for the search engines out there.

Those 2 days are significant deviations from a constant pattern of regular readership, so I assume the hot topics or search engines generated the increment in traffic.

Bill Wolfe said...

One more question:

Do the Google analytic data on visitors count the registered users?

I have a lot more registered users than hits.

David Tulloch said...

I captured the graph as a screen grab and then posted that image. It is also worth clarifying that the graph is the hit count for just that one page.

As for your other questions, I have no good answer. Analytics doesn't seem to have good documentation.