What Site Stats Mean

While at the con in Atlanta, I attended a workshop on author promotion. It was quite possibly the most valuable workshop I went to.

One of the things they mentioned was authors utilizing their websites. And in that part we discussed website statistics.

There’s Unique Hits (or visitors), which is the better way to tell how many people visited a website. So if Visitor 1 drops by at 9am and then later at 12pm, they are only counted once.

Then there’s Page Views. This is the number of pages total that all the visitors viewed. If Visitor 1 read today’s post and then went over to look at the link page, that’s TWO page views.

The best way to view how active your site is (vs folks just zooming through) is to take the number of page views and divide it by the number of unique visitors.

VISITS

Total 46,600
Average Per Day 107
Average Visit Length 0:54
Last Hour 6
Today 98
This Week 750

PAGE VIEWS

Total 67,064
Average Per Day 140
Average Per Visit 1.3
Last Hour 7
Today 141
This Week 979

This is my site stats according to SiteMeter.com. So if I take the page views today (141) and divide it by the visits today (98), I can see that on average, a visitor sees 1.43 pages. SiteMeter’s stats gives me this information. They say it is 1.3 since they used the average per days (140 / 107) as their numbers. The stats also tell me that the average visit was almost a full minute.

How real are these numbers? Good question.

There’s a plug-in for WordPress called ShortStats. It tells me that today I had 1261 unique “hits”. Big diff between it and SiteMeter.

Then there’s other meters/counters such as Blog Flux’s Mapstats.

Unique Visitors
Today: 63
Last 7 Days: 560
This Month: 1920
Total: 37891

Page Views
Today: 79
Last 7 Days: 635
This Month: 2230
Total: 47399

Again, I take the total page views (79) and divide it by the total uniques (63) which gives me 1.25. What I like about Blog Flux is their graphs.

I can see at a glance just how relevant the two are. I can also see at a glance that almost everyone views one page, with a few viewing two perhaps.

Regardless, it is obvious this site gets a lot of visitors. So am I that popular a writer?? No, not in the least.

The next thing to look for is what are the visitors looking for. For the most part, visitors to this site are looking for images. The tattoo discussion I had a long time ago about The Tree of Life gets a lot of hits. One of the top pages visited is the Past vs Passed discussion. Very few visitors come here because I am a writer and they adore me and my book.

What can I do to attract more folks to me as a writer? Well, not do it here! I need to attract folks over to my main site where the writing info is. I checked in with the Shortstat plugin over there (while “They’re Just Words” is not a blog, I still use WordPress for content management) and got some depressing results. My “redneck humor” images are the biggest attraction.

What can I do to correct this? Not a clue. But the fact that so many people visit this blog, it gives me a chance to give big HINTS that I am a writer, I have a book (published by a REAL publisher), and I am actively writing more. I can use my name (Paula Offutt) and the title of my book (Butch Girls Can Fix Anything)and make them links. I can check this blog and the main site and make sure a visitor can get to the info they want with as few clicks as possible. (I had to click 5 times to find the right page!) The more links, the more search engines notice. The less clicks, the greater the chance the visitor will stick around.