h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's good to hear Happy Nerd.
I take it to mean that spiders are not counted.
And I'm inclined to believe that until I hear otherwise.


You will forgive my observation that the word
Hogmanay looks like 'the counting of many Hogs'.



~jwf~

from my reading today, I feel I must point out that there is a technical difference between "page views" and "hits". As I understand it, a "page view" is the actual downloading of the html of a page while a "hit" is the downloading of each individual file called for in the page view -- all the images, etc. on the page. So, one "page view" may equal a great many "hits".

I think what we're all interested in here is "page views" and the time spent on the page which the discomfited Nerd mentions.

Those both seem to be looking good!

But . . . .


I use Firefox on two computers and pretty much leave them on 24 hours a day with the Brunel convo popup open on each. It refreshes every few (five?) minutes.

I just had a look at the Page info for the popup on one of the computers and found in the Privacy and History section answering the question "Have I visited this website before today?" the answer "Yes, 1,589 times". For most of the last twenty-four hours, I've not been anywhere near this computer.

That means between my upstairs and my downstairs computers just sitting idle, I account for over 3000 page views today.

Can that be right?

I enjoyed that Hogamany entry and was surprised
to see the word hug highlighted in the text.

So I clicked, and lo and behold, an early (2001)
and delightful edited entry on hugs.
A603668

Indeed this place is a wonderland.

~jwf~

Oh. Never mind.

That information in my last post was that I'd visited the convo popup 1589 times on other days before today's single visit, not 1589 times today.

That makes a lot more sense.

The headline figures we get are 'unique visitors' which roughly equates to one browser session.

The Alexa rankings are also slightly suspect. How does Alexa know how many people are visiting this site? Basically, Alexa produces a fairly popular browser toolbar, which sends statistics back to Alexa. Alexa then extrapolates from that: If X people with our toolbar behave like this, we can assume that Y people in total behave like that, and thereby extrapolate rankings.

It's probably fairly accurate, but it's not gospel.

TRiG.

What i've been really interested in this evening is not the precision of traffic estimates so much as how hootoo's traffic compares with other sites'. I'm hoping that, even if methodologies produce suspect totals, the suspect totals of sites estimates by the same methodology will reflect actual proportions of traffic.

Does that make sense?

I am interested in what sorts of sites get comparable traffic to hootoo. That would give greater meaning, I think, to the raw numbers.

makes you proud to be an hootooer don't it!



and to all concerned

and the "viewing" info is fantastic - to be a yearly event I hope


H2G2 gets an O.B.E. off me = the Order of Brilliant Excellence

In a similar vein to anhaga's question - what percentage of those visits are from new users as opposed to returning users?

That way we can work out how many hits *we* account for...

"we have people reading all sorts of things, far too many to list" Icy North has been listing quite a few here: h2g2 Citations http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F12531252?thread=6296494

Not that it really matters much, but is there any differentiation in the "hit-count" between articles being read or
casual readings by someone that is signed in? For instance, in a half-hour visit, I may return to my PS a dozen
times and browse 20 to 40 threads. So in just a little time, I as a single entity might add 50 'hits' to the counter.
(Imagine the count from one of the ACEs during an average evening of greetings ...)

I never 'hit' anybody. I just give them the occasional slap

That post (of mine) alone accounts for 3 hits to read the thread, perhaps 4 hits during shaping and previewing, one to
post it, and another to take me back to my PS. So 9 or 10 'hits' in a few minutes

Nick,

The analytics software (I assume) we're using notes the page you enter the site on - that means it can tell the difference between people who land on an entry from Google, and those who've used the login screen.

I'm not an expert in reading the statistics, but I can assure you that the people reading the forums are by far and away outnumbered, by those new visitors who come to read our Entries.

Also, I just wanted to endorse Happy Nerd's comment, that the average time these new readers spend on each Entry shows that they are in fact reading them - so they are obviously finding what they want to read here.

Of course, I never perview. That's why lilitis keeps dropping into the conversations

Ah, I didn't know the numbers were crunched, sifted, tumbled, lost twice or thrice, and then produce meaningful counts. Including average 'times' and the like. Thanks, I have learned a few new things and haven't even had my first coffee of the day yet.

Morning All,

Just to confirm and clarify a few things. We use a couple of different analytic packages to see what people are reading, and how we can improve that.

We count page views. As has been said, a page view is different from a request / hit. For a start, hits aren't reliable. If content is cached, you don't get repeat hits. The page view we use is when a browser asks for the page, usually an entry in the edited Guide. We then track when the user leaves that page, so we can see how long they spend on it. From this, as Lanzababy says we can see that people are indeed reading the entries.

The majority of our traffic by far and a way comes from people using search engines like Google to look for something in particular, and finding we have an entry on it. There is only one forum that currently appears in the top 300 pages, and that's the one hanging off how to buy and cook a turkey. When we say that the vast majority of traffic to the site is the edited entries, we're not joking. h2g2 is indeed a reference site, a reference to life, the universe, everything and corny references. But it is.

Thankfully it also has a great community that hangs off that making it a fun place to hang out between writing entries, or just hanging out with the writers of those entries.

I can't answer how many more visitors we're getting now compared to when the BBC had the site, but I can say that until the week leading up to Christmas our visitors steadily grew. And usually the growth was in the thousands of extra unique visitors per day.

I also can't really compare h2g2 traffic to other sites, because it's unique. There isn't another site out there that does what h2g2 does. There's lots of sites that do small parts of what we have, but we are unique. I can say however that in the past I've worked on some large sites for some large clients, and h2g2 blows them out of the water.

I can say though that the figures over at Alexa aren't very accurate. In fact, they're really *not* accurate.

I guess the take-home message, folks, is that you have lots of fans out there. They are really reading the stuff we write.

We should:

a. be proud of this. And
b. keep writing.