Approximately a year ago, when we switched from Blogger/Blogspot to the new platform, I installed Google Analytics. Surprisingly, web statistics vary greatly between counters, presumably due to how they account for partial web page loads. I’m told that Google Analytics is considered very reliable. Here are some highlights of the past year:
- Average weekday* daily unique readers: 1,076
- Average weekend* daily unique readers: 621
- Day of the week with most unique readers: Tuesday (averaging 1,098)
- Day of the year with most unique readers: Tuesday, July 5, 2011 – 1,882 unique readers (after July 4 weekend and the summer camp post)
- Day of the year with the 2nd most unique readers: Tuesday, May 10, 2011 – 1,426 unique readers (day of the women in Jewish media post)
- Week with the most pageviews: May 8 – May 14, 2011 (38,324)
And here are the top 50 posts (excluding news & links) along with unique pageview counts. I think the main lesson is that controversy garners attention, as if we needed data to prove that. Below that are the top referring websites/search engines and top referring websites/blogs.
Top Posts
Top Referring Websites/Search Engines
| Rank | Source/Medium | Visits |
| 1) | Google / organic | 108,751 |
| 2) | 22,200 | |
| 3) | Google.com | 13,643 |
| 4) | Twitter (@gilstudent) | 9,684 |
| 5) | Bing / organic | 3,089 |
| 6) | Yahoo / organic | 1,972 |
| 7) | Internal Links | 1,923 |
| 8) | AOL / organic | 1,540 |
| 9) | JS-Kit comments | 1,158 |
| 10) | Twitter (Other) | 818 |
Top Referring Websites/Blogs
| Rank | Source/Medium | Visits |
| 1) | Haemtza.blogspot.com | 7,093 |
| 2) | Parsha.blogspot.com | 5,053 |
| 3) | JIDaily.com | 4,849 |
| 4) | Rationalistjudaism.com | 4,185 |
| 5) | Adderabbi.blogspot.com | 978 |
| 6) | Daattorah.blogspot.com | 954 |
| 7) | Michaelmakovi.blogspot.com | 937 |
| 8) | Lifeinisrael.blogspot.com | 871 |
| 9) | Walkingthegreyline.blogspot.com | 852 |
| 10) | Kavvanah.wordpress.com | 840 |
* Weekday is defined as Sunday through Thursday, on which nights this blog is generally update. Weekend is Friday and Saturday, plus Jewish holidays (both days).
These statistics do not make sense. “Week with the most pageviews: May 8 – May 14, 2011 (38,324)” means that the lowest possible number for the day with the most pageviews is 5,475.
Oh sorry, I thought that pageviews were unique. My mistake.
There are on-line discussions about how well Google Analytics filters out hits by “spiders” or “bots” — programs run by search engines traveling your pages in order to index them for their databases. Bots can massively increase the number of hits. Also, given the number of machines Google and Bing have running spiders, they can also significantly increase the number of unique “viewers”, as each machines address will be deemed “unique”.
Anyway, I would think their quality at knowing what’s by a human and what’s not is the primary difference between counters.
Interesting statistics.
Are you planning on reloading the comments to your old posts – there was much interesting material there, and it would be a shame to keep this from the public.
The comments cannot be moved to this blog. I’ve had people try multiple times. The comments on the old blog mysteriously disappeared but I’ve never put in the effort to learn why. It’s on my to-do list.
If your haloscan/ JS-Kit account is still active (you can tell if you are able to log in) then you might be able to get them back by simply reinstalling the code on your old blog.
For some reason, reading the statistics made me wonder if I have been overestimating the power and reach of this site. If one of the leading frum sites reaches only an average of a bit over 1k a day, what does that say?
On the other hand, one could say that it reaches movers and shakers, thinkers and people of influence, so it is powerful more that way than just the numbers alone might imply. Reaching 1k leaders a day is not the same as reaching 1k amcha a day.
Thoughts?
Mordechai, I agree. But I’m probably one of the few willing to be transparent about those numbers 😉
Wow. It’s pretty cool that I’m #8 on your top referring list.
Do the statistics include activity on Google Reader? I rarely go to your site, but I do read some of your posts there.
No the stats don’t include RSS readers or the 100+ e-mail subscribers.
You should also consider all those who subscribe on RSS — Google Reader alone says 420 subscribers.