Thought I would share some stats

[Erik Sine]

Out of estimated 5,000 electric sign companies in the states, here is the visitorship for the months of January for 2008 vs 2009

Month of Jan 2008

Unique visitors

4,307

# of visits

6,855

Hits

443,329

Month of Jan 2009

Unique visitors

8,269

# of visits

20,308

Hits

1,100,292

[Brian]

you should be commended for your work...I have to buy you a couple of brews in vegas

Here's to ya!!!!!

[Travis]

What are the definitions of the categories?

[YYZ]

What are the definitions of the categories?

You first have to define a visit. Typically, a visit is when a unique IP on non-cookie'd computer opens a page on the website. A visitor session ends after a time, usually 20 minutes or an hour, so if they come back a few times a day they do count as additional repeat visits. Once the date changes to the next day, visitors would register as a "unique visitor" again.

Unique Visitors = the number of unique IP addresses to make visits, with a caveat: If one person visits the site every 48 hours, they could count as 15 uniques per month. Understanding how often each unique visits helps understand how valuable this measurement is, but that is much harder to track.

Number of visits = sort of self explanatory. Any new unique visitor, or unique who returns within 24 hours makes a repeat visit. Last year, visitors would visit the site approx 1.5 times per day. This year, visitors come back approx 2.5 times per day - so there is better visitor retention and loyalty.

Hits = number of files requested from the server. This includes images, ads, counters. This page has hundreds of files in it (lots of smileys, avatars, buttons, etc), so each visit to this very page is hundreds of hits.

You have to do some creative math to actually make use of these numbers. The simple thing would be to divide 8,269 uniques by 30 days to come up with 275 genuinely unique visitors to the site in January. Now, I don't come here every day and many users might not come for a week at a time, so it's sure to be higher than 275.

[Erik Sine]

You first have to define a visit. Typically, a visit is when a unique IP on non-cookie'd computer opens a page on the website. A visitor session ends after a time, usually 20 minutes or an hour, so if they come back a few times a day they do count as additional repeat visits. Once the date changes to the next day, visitors would register as a "unique visitor" again.

Unique Visitors = the number of unique IP addresses to make visits, with a caveat: If one person visits the site every 48 hours, they could count as 15 uniques per month. Understanding how often each unique visits helps understand how valuable this measurement is, but that is much harder to track.

Number of visits = sort of self explanatory. Any new unique visitor, or unique who returns within 24 hours makes a repeat visit. Last year, visitors would visit the site approx 1.5 times per day. This year, visitors come back approx 2.5 times per day - so there is better visitor retention and loyalty.

Hits = number of files requested from the server. This includes images, ads, counters. This page has hundreds of files in it (lots of smileys, avatars, buttons, etc), so each visit to this very page is hundreds of hits.

You have to do some creative math to actually make use of these numbers. The simple thing would be to divide 8,269 uniques by 30 days to come up with 275 genuinely unique visitors to the site in January. Now, I don't come here every day and many users might not come for a week at a time, so it's sure to be higher than 275.

No, my stats are very different. In a 30 day period:

Unique Visitor, counts a single IP address for that 30 day period. So basically 8,269 independent I.P. Addresses have visited the site for the month of January, i.e. Travis, YYZ, Chubby count as one each.

# of visits, will count all times visited for the month. i.e. Travis visited 5 times, Chubby 20 times, YYZ 3 times, "guest" 1 time to equal 20,308 #of visits.

Hits buttons hit, pages viewed, etc

[YYZ]

Sorry Erik - I wasn't trying to pout water on your numbers. Clearly they are much better than a year ago and that is the key thing to consider, but you should look into this a little further.

A hit does not = a click. A hit is a request to your server for a file by a computer. If a single webpage has 100 files, it counts as 100 hits. Visit 20 pages with 100 files and you have generated 2,000 hits on the server.

The number of visits is correct, but the number of unique IPs is actually much lower than 8,269. For one, services like AOL rotate IPs for all their users to help their users from being tracked - so one AOL user could actually count as 10 users. The biggest problem is that most counters count uniques like this: Total uniques from Jan 1 + total from Jan 2 + total from Jan 3 and so on - but the number does start from zero every day, not every month. You'd have to be using an external tracker with a complex java/cookie setup to get the more accurate numbers. They SAY they count monthly, but it's usually the day 1 + day 2 method I described above.

I've had several websites over the years and you can test this in several ways. Set up a subdomain that no one knows about, is not searchable, etc, (say toenail.thesignsyndicate.com. Your server will allow you to track stats for that subdomain separately from traffic here. If you go to your secret site once per day for a week, you'll be the only IP to show up on each day, but at the end of the week you'll be counted as 7 unique visitors.

Another example: That <-- Gene Simmons avatar I have has been "hit" 1,471 times in the month of January - meaning 1,471 page views - and it is one of about 75 "hits" on this page. Multiply 1,471 x 75 and you get 110,000 "hits" just on page views that I have posted in, so pages that my posts are in are equal to approx 10% of your traffic. By looking at your index or new post pages, it shows you exactly how many times each thread is viewed - those are very important numbers. Some of the best threads on here might break 1,000 views, but take many months to do so.

Simple control panel stats like visits, uniques and hits are very limited in their value. You have to use an external service and/or do some creative tracking yourself. Count the number of times your header has been viewed and that is the number of page views, for example. You can create custom images (say a clear gif 1px x 1px) that is placed once on every forum page, or a different image for your index page, etc.

http://www.sabahan.com/2007/09/24/hits-vs-...ou-should-know/

http://www.thinkmetrics.com/inaccuracies-i...measurement.php

Monthly stats can be even more misleading on occasion. JICWEBS sets the standard for calculating unique visitors per month when producing audits. The official method for counting unique visitors per month is to calculate how many you got in a single day, then multiply that by 31. Thus if 100,000 unique visitors came to my news site in a day, I have 3.1 million unique visitors per month. So be aware that “unique visitors per month” may not be counting how many different people actually visited the site that month. Or it may. It depends.

Edited January 31, 2009 by YYZ

[Erik Sine]

I read all that and it doesn't sound like what's going on here. If you want to count how many times your avatar has been hit from your host well than you only have 433 posts across the entire board.

I will agree about aol, those useres have dynamic address's, I don't see that mnay AOL users here, the last AOL regular user that I know of was Joe.

My counters do not restart from day to day, or every 12 hours like some, mine begin and end 12am on the 1st of the month and at the end of the month. NOw what is inaccurate, is for me to tell you how many show up in a year because mine only count unique visitors every month period.

Unique Visitor:

A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this host make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.

The unique number of visits adds up since my email data base of weekly newsletters that go out are over 6,000

Out of our 8,269 unique visitors, dial up and AOL users will decrease this count (Dynamic IP's), but as I stated earlier I don't have a whole lot of "regulars" using these types of ISP's

[YYZ]

Right - so my 433 posts were seen an average of 3.39 times each this past month. We know it's not ALL my posts and probably on the ~10 most recent, which means that each post is probably seen about 40 times each. It's not how many posts I make, but how many times my posts are viewed per month. If you had 8,000~ uniques then your thread views would be in the thousands quite quickly.

The great things about forums that show "views" is that they give you a really good measure of how many real views and visits you get. Another site that I posted on last night has had 2,600 views of my thread since about midnight last night. In that same time, this thread has been viewed 60 times - and this included non registered and non logged-in viewers.

I know that I visit this site about 15 days per month, but can come back many times each day if there are active threads. From this, I probably count as 30 or 40 visits a month for this site. In pretty much all those visits I'm viewing threads that I have posted in, and therefore "hitting" my own avatar 30 or 40 times, out of 1,471 hits in January.

I know your counter starts on the 1st of the month and shows the stats monthly - the only way to be certain is to do that little subdomain test I described. That's the only way you'll know if your uniques are truly based on a 30 day period, or if they are cumulative day+day or dayx30 numbers. I believed the same thing you did until I performed the test myself. That basketball website I had was averaging 35,000 uniques per month at one point, which I knew to be inaccurate. It was really about 300 heavy users and a similar number of occasional visitors, but their visitation patterns as well as dynamic IPs, deleted cookies, etc will always throw those numbers out of whack. 600 users is actually really good, if that's the kind of numbers you'd be getting here.

Does your phplist newsletter track actual click-thru numbers?

[Erik Sine]

It's hard to get back when you have the flu.

Here are some more Unique numbers over the years.

Launched December of 2004

2005 JULY UNIQUE VISITORS

759

2006 JAN UNIQUE VISITORS

1,457

2007 JAN UNIQUE VISITORS

3,466

2008 JAN UNIQUE VISITORS

3,466

2009 JAN UNIQUE VISITORS

8,766

In either case I hear what you're saying. But the fact is this thread is not that eye popping for anyone passing by to click on. Right now I see 78 views in a couple of days. We can look at "Former ImagePoint employee" started near the middle of the month and that has 809 views.

I now send out both html newsletters and text newsletters for the fact that a lot of users either have mail programs don't like html and throw them into the spam folder of they won't be allowed to download the images, or are blocked. Depending on the newsletters and amount of images or links I'm getting anywhere from 1,200 to 3,405 uniques. I can't monitor simple text newsletters. I'm probably goign to give the html newsletters a break since it appears the text letters seem to get through better on newsletter days except, for GWH or adverts I need to get out.

So glad you brought up the newsletter thing, as I can now verify that my unique visitorship is far from the 300-600 range.

Maybe one day when I have time (which isn't much) I'll try and get together with some people who I have working on my custom software come up with a solution. until then, I got work, family, GWH readings and Vegas all coming up.