Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Rikweb website statistics

So last December, as I was sorting things out with my webhost, I got them to add Matrixstats to my service so I could keep track of comings and goings at the Rikweb website. They were offering it for free, and I'm not a person to turn down free stuff - especially shiny free stuff like Matrixstats.

And then, after I got it all set up and running, I promptly forgot about it. Until today, when I stumbled upon the wonderful shininess of website statistics once again. Completely by accident, of course, but then that's often the best way to do these things.

Now webstats, in my view, are pretty meaningless in their raw state. The total number of hits is not a measure of web-worthiness. Especially if a lot of those hits are coming from spiders and other creepy crawlies clambering all round the site to feed snippets back to the Google mothernest. But some of the stats are interesting.

For instance, over the past 10 months over 23,000 sessions requested more than one page on the website, which probably translates into over 20 thousand people (ie humans with pulses and suchlike) visiting the site. Thats 2,000 people knocking on the door each month.

Yes, I know, that's peanuts for a website. But then rikweb.co.uk is not trying to sell anything to anyone, nor am I paying for adverts to get people to visit the RikVerse or the Kalieda Encyclopaedia, nor do I spam my links (much).

More exciting to me, 6,000 sessions (people) have spent more than 15 minutes browsing through the website during their visit - which translates to 600 people a month, or 20 people a day. This is ten times more people than I ever hoped for: I'd be happy if just 2 people a day popped by for a browse!

And then I found the statistics for downloads (in other words how many times my poetry chapbook files have been downloaded) ... and I was blown away.

Over the past 10 months:
So even if only 10% of those downloads were by people who wanted to download my poems, that's still a lot of people who cared enough about my poems to download them. If you were one of those people, can I just say: thank you! I hope you enjoyed reading my poems.

... and no, you can't have a refund.

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