I just got an excellent question from an NBN member that many of you may have asked at times…
I have a question about Nature Blog Network’s statistics.
Why do we see a “Last Week” with visitor data equal to zero for the whole week, and also a “December 08″ with visitor data equal to zero for the whole month, when neither is true?
I notice it is the same “problem” for all members, which is at least “ok”. But isn’t this making our overall average statistics here lower than the real case?
Keep up the good work anyways, this place is a nice place to be
I’m sorry to say that the particular toplist platform this site runs on isn’t perfect. One problem we’ve seen over time is that certain days, weeks, or months of tracked page views seem to disappear. As you say, since this affects everyone equally, overall rankings shouldn’t be significantly impacted. However, it does diminish the efficacy of the NBN tracker as a dedicated stat tracker. (It also makes me wonder if one day we’ll have to move to a different platform, but that’s an issue for another day…)
When it comes to tracking your stats, knowledge truly is power. At the very least, you should be checking to see where your traffic is coming from and which posts, pages, or search terms are bringing them. From there, you can start to explore bounce rate, click-throughs, and the differences among direct, search, and social media visitors.
I strongly recommend Google Analytics and Sitemeter as free, high-quality stat trackers. We use both on 10,000 Birds since each gives a different snapshot of site traffic. Sitemeter is excellent for up-to-the-minute information about traffic, referral sources, and top entry and exit pages. Google Analytics, on the other hand, provides more complex data to evaluate.
How do you track site traffic on your blog?
6 Comments
I was dedicated to feedburner until they sold out. now I use both feedburner and google analytics to get a more complete idea of my traffic.
I know what you mean, D. The Feedburner stat tracker also showed some interesting info. But look at who they sold out to!
For what its worth…I added up the totals from my zero week and discovered it was the exact same total as the “missing” last week. If you count the weeks from January’s first full week, we are in the seventh week…that is to say, the zero week is a non-week.
Sorry…I meant to say, the “last week” totals are the same as week 6.
I use Sitemeter, but I will have to consider the addition of Google Analytics. For some reason I thought there was a fee associated with GA, so that’s why I shied away from it. The thing that has been most beneficial to me with tracking stats so far is seeing what kind of search engine queries bring folks to my page. I’ve seen some kind of weird ones.
I hope I can broadcast a question here to Blogger users: I sometimes (maybe once a week) notice a cluster of hits (anywhere from 5-10) that come in all around the same time, and the referring URL is a bunch of garbledy-gook, but within the garbledy-gook of each I always see the words “PUBLISH MODE”. When I try to follow the URL, I always get an error message from Blogger. Also, these clusters are almost always from domains/IP addresses outside of North America. Has anyone else ever experienced this?
StatCounter, but strictly for shallow amusement.
For instance, there are 4 searches which bring relatively large numbers of people to my blog.
Two of them (“Lorri Bauston” and “Sea Shepherd book”) lead to posts which will give the person the info they’re looking for, the third is “Zulu rituals” which I mentioned only as the last entry in the “Encyclopedia of Nature and Religion” I wrote about, and one is for “hungry cougars” which I’m fairly sure comes from people looking for porn rather than my little anti-hunting diatribe.