Site Statistics and Trends

We used Sitemeter and our own server to track statistics. There is a rather large discrepency between the two, with our server showing more than 200,000 page views from July 11 - 17 and Sitemeter showing under 30,000. There are problems with both numbers, due to technical issues, but regardless of which you like better, this was a very respectible showing for the event. We are still receiving several hundred visitors a day, with nearly 2,000 pageviews, according to Sitemeter.

So, with an eye to trends, vs. actual numbers, which as we have seen above are fairly problemmatic, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week were the busiest in terms of all measures: visits, page views and pages viewed per visit. All measures are in decline, yet still respectible nearly a week after the event "closed."

The most popular pages were the interviews, with Jay Rosen's heading the list, followed by Seth Godin, then Dan Gillmor. The most popular post that wasn't an interview was Trevor's inaugural post, Re-thinking PR.

Our referrers list was topped by Technorati. The order was:

www.technorati.com
blo.gs/ping.php
technoflak.blogspot.com/
www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display
weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/
www.prwatch.org/spin/
sethgodin.typepad.com/
www.scripting.com/
www.feedster.com/
www.natterjackpr.com/

Our wiki was also a good referrer, with people stopping by through several different pages.

We'll keep an eye on the trends, and will share them with everyone over the next few weeks.

Author: Elizabeth Albrycht | Jul 22, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: Announcements

Comments

I think the reason for the great difference in terms of hits between the sitemeter stats and your own server stats would probably be the number of users hitting the server via RSS feeds. (That is if your server is recording all page views.)

That means that they never actually visit the page, instead they load the RSS/XML feeds into their feed reader. Without a page being loaded that has the sitemeter scripts being loaded, sitemeter will not log it as a hit. Thus sitemeters' hit count will not be the same as the servers' one.

Note: I'm assuming that the server logs a hit as someone loading any of the pages it serves (so that includes image/rss/html/php files and more).

Posted by: William Luu at July 22, 2004 09:02 PM

About: The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.

Links: The New PR Wiki

Recent Entries: Looking forward to 2.0; Site Statistics and Trends; A participant’s final thoughts; Traditional PR is dead - Long Live DIY PR; Quiet is the new loud

Recent Comments: Rick Barry on A Very Brief Look at Blogging for the Uninitiated Executive; George Mc Quade on The Battle Over PR; Duncan Adams on Robert Scoble interviewed on Corporate Blogging; Kevin O'Keefe on How to launch a corporate blog for a professional services organization; William Luu on Site Statistics and Trends