I am popular on the interwebs
Every Monday I get an email giving me the weekly statistics for my website. It only gives me a basic breakdown in the email itself - the amount of unique visits, first time visits, return visits, and page loads for each day of the week and an average. I generally just check the unique visits figure - according to Statcounter which is the service I use, that figure represents the total of the returning visits and first time visits, so all visits. I usually have between 500-600 unique visitors a week so I don't often look at the more in depth statistics unless the count is much higher than normal. The highest it's ever been was 1,346 in March 2013 which was incredible. It usually down to someone posting a link to my site somewhere and more often than not it's one specific page which gets most of the traffic. It can often be both interesting and amusing to see where the visitors are coming from and in what context the site is being linked.
Last week's unique visitors totalled 714 so I went to Statcounter to get some further information as to where they were all coming from. It made for some interesting reading.
Top 4 pages on my website are:
Stand to Pee - 300 visitors
Harry Potter Gloucester Cathedral Tour - 34 visitors
Testosterone Diary - 18 visitors
Trans 101 - 11 visitors
The rest of the pages all got less than 4 visitors so that's quite a large chunk of people going to those four pages. The amount of visitors that the Harry Potter page gets is so strange because that page is pretty much hidden on my site and only linked on the sitemap. It seems to be a top result if you search specifically for 'gloucester cathedral harry potter' - in the top 5 no less - but even more bizarre is the person who got to that page from Facebook!
The incoming traffic statistics tells me where people are coming from, firstly giving a general overview of three main areas before breaking those down further into specific visits.
19% Direct Traffic
22% Referring Websites (Including Social Media: 0.5%)
59% Search Engine Referrals
The Direct Traffic comes from people who either use a bookmark to go to my website or from people who type the URL into the browser.
Referring Websites are usually the most interesting ones because those are the ones that are linking directly to my site for some reason. A lot of them tend to be other Trans websites, such as transguys.com, ftmtransition.com or the various Trans tumblr sites. Turns out my site is getting very international now! A lot of the more recent visitors had come via the German and French versions of the wikihow page on how to pee standing up. There was also one visit from the Indonesia version! Other pages that are linking to my website are an anti-racism training programme from collectiveliberation.org, and a discussion on reddit about peeing standing up.
Then finally there's the people that find my site through a search engine. Mostly it's Google (86%) followed by baidu.com which is becoming increasingly popular (7.2%). Unfortunately Google no longer includes the keywords that people have searched for for security reasons (ha!) but there are a few search queries that are listed. Including some incredibly bizarre ones such as the person who went to bing.com at 2.45am, typed in "how to copy a car body without acomputer" and discovered my STP page. Or the person who found the same page through a badly typed search for "WWW.pee.asi an .com". (Even more amusingly, someone searched for "crossdress swindon" and found my Harry Potter panto.)
The last thing I usually check, just for curiosity more than anything, is the country stats. It's always fun to see where in the world my visitors are coming from! Despite the fact that my site aimed at UK people, over 40% of visitors are from the US. After that the most people come from the UK (17%), Germany (9%), Canada (7%), China (7%), India (3%) and Australia (3%). The rest are often just one or two hits from a very random list of countries such as Kenya, Japan, Taiwan, Israel, Vietnam, Trinidad & Tobago, Russia, Latvia, South Korea and United Arab Emirates. They all looked at the STP page apart from the UAE who looked at my T diary.
It boggles my mind sometimes just the amount of people who look at my website, where they all come from and how they find it (usually through Google while looking for porn).
Last week's unique visitors totalled 714 so I went to Statcounter to get some further information as to where they were all coming from. It made for some interesting reading.
Top 4 pages on my website are:
Stand to Pee - 300 visitors
Harry Potter Gloucester Cathedral Tour - 34 visitors
Testosterone Diary - 18 visitors
Trans 101 - 11 visitors
The rest of the pages all got less than 4 visitors so that's quite a large chunk of people going to those four pages. The amount of visitors that the Harry Potter page gets is so strange because that page is pretty much hidden on my site and only linked on the sitemap. It seems to be a top result if you search specifically for 'gloucester cathedral harry potter' - in the top 5 no less - but even more bizarre is the person who got to that page from Facebook!
The incoming traffic statistics tells me where people are coming from, firstly giving a general overview of three main areas before breaking those down further into specific visits.
19% Direct Traffic
22% Referring Websites (Including Social Media: 0.5%)
59% Search Engine Referrals
The Direct Traffic comes from people who either use a bookmark to go to my website or from people who type the URL into the browser.
Referring Websites are usually the most interesting ones because those are the ones that are linking directly to my site for some reason. A lot of them tend to be other Trans websites, such as transguys.com, ftmtransition.com or the various Trans tumblr sites. Turns out my site is getting very international now! A lot of the more recent visitors had come via the German and French versions of the wikihow page on how to pee standing up. There was also one visit from the Indonesia version! Other pages that are linking to my website are an anti-racism training programme from collectiveliberation.org, and a discussion on reddit about peeing standing up.
Then finally there's the people that find my site through a search engine. Mostly it's Google (86%) followed by baidu.com which is becoming increasingly popular (7.2%). Unfortunately Google no longer includes the keywords that people have searched for for security reasons (ha!) but there are a few search queries that are listed. Including some incredibly bizarre ones such as the person who went to bing.com at 2.45am, typed in "how to copy a car body without acomputer" and discovered my STP page. Or the person who found the same page through a badly typed search for "WWW.pee.asi an .com". (Even more amusingly, someone searched for "crossdress swindon" and found my Harry Potter panto.)
The last thing I usually check, just for curiosity more than anything, is the country stats. It's always fun to see where in the world my visitors are coming from! Despite the fact that my site aimed at UK people, over 40% of visitors are from the US. After that the most people come from the UK (17%), Germany (9%), Canada (7%), China (7%), India (3%) and Australia (3%). The rest are often just one or two hits from a very random list of countries such as Kenya, Japan, Taiwan, Israel, Vietnam, Trinidad & Tobago, Russia, Latvia, South Korea and United Arab Emirates. They all looked at the STP page apart from the UAE who looked at my T diary.
It boggles my mind sometimes just the amount of people who look at my website, where they all come from and how they find it (usually through Google while looking for porn).