Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

In February, I discovered and decided to make use of Google Analytics, a web statistics monitoring package provided by that search giant that is the Almight Google. I have web statistics on my website as provided by my host, but it leaves out data such as search terms used. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd summarise them here. This is the information garnered from mid-February, when I first started monitoring, to the 31st of March.

Monitoring is only on main menu pages. Individual pages are not counted by Google.

Visitors

In the course of over a month, there were 233 visitors, 79 of those were people who were coming back to the site for more than one look.

They came from 15 countries, 90 of them from the UK with the US providing the second most visitors at 64. The top five cities people came from were, in order: London, Warrington, Sydney, Vancouver and Wallington. There were also visitors from Moose Jaw.

Referrals

The majority of the people visiting my site were direct links, meaning they didn't follow a link from another website, but the second most common method to find my site was through Google.

The majority of the search terms used were b-jewelled or some variation thereof, which makes me rather pleased that apparently people were searching for me directly.

Other most common terms include:

• earth final conflict fanfiction (15)
  
• torchwood fanfiction or recaps (7)
  
• "she goes by the" -raconteurs site:uk (1)
  

No, I'm not sure what that last one is myself. The next most common referral was from my own LJ, with a sharp spike up on March 17th, where the number of visitors triple from the average after posting a fic on the torchwood_fic LJ community. The other big referrers were a Stargate fic rec community on LJ, and a private LJ where a friend had provided a link to some of my stuff.

Others include the Shaharazard fic archive, and various web forums I belong to.

Pages

According to Google, the most commonly viewed page after the index is the Stargate fic index page with 96 views. The next most commonly viewed is the Torchwood fic page, with 82. The least popular page was the Subreality fic page with only 8 views.

The story on the webstats from my hosting package is somewhat different, as it includes all pages on the site. According to them, the top five pages (not counting the index page) for March are:

• b-jewelled.co.uk/personal.shtml
  
• b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
  
• b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/sgfic.shtml
  
• b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/sg1/allthingslost.html
  
• b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/efcfic.shtml
  

See what my visitors are generally coming to read? All about me and fanfic apparently.