I’ve been taking a look at my visitor logs lately and I’m seeing traffic from all over the place. I had no idea who they get here because the lines of code that I wrote don’t track everything. If it does track the referrers then not all of the information is records.
My code only tracks the host that they are coming in from. For example, I’m using Sympatico to access the internet. My code will read that and store it into the database. In the administration section, I view the status and see how many times the visitor has been to my site. I look at it from a daily perspective because viewing the weekly statistics is a bit too much. I have Google Analytics to keep track of that stuff.
Lately, I’ve been getting people from Stanford University visiting my site. I don’t know if these are people or it’s just bots scouring my page for stuff. A few of them have landed on my blog. According to my program, they are getting there by directly typing in the address of that specific blog. How the address of that post was found by that visitor, I have no clue.
From a web master’s point of view, it’s interesting to see the traffic hitting my site. The search terms that people google and somehow land on my page is quite interesting. Google has been sending a lot of traffic this way. Their bots are on my site every day.
Compared to the statistics from last year, I would say that the traffic here has increased a lot. Actually, it’s almost exactly a year since the last time I posted an entry about Google Analytics. It was back in November 2005 when I first signed up for Google Analytics. So let’s how much difference a year made.
The top left hand box shows my visit statistics. For this particular week, there were 320 visits with an average of 7.2 pages viewed per visit. The box beside it shows the ratio of old, 77.5% and new visitors, 22.5%. Below that one displays how those visitors arrived at my site. As you can see, Google is among the top referrer. And last, there’s the map of the locations that the visitors are from. The dots are scattered all over the place.
Last year, there were 52 visits for the week with an average of 4.3 pages viewed per visit. Approximately 63.46% of the visitors were old visitors while 36.54% of them were new visitors. Back then, Google was not the one that was sending traffic my way. Visitors would get to my site by directly typing the URL into the address bar. The majority of my visitors were from this side of the world. I didn’t have any visitors from the other hemisphere.
Anyway, I am still trying to figure out why there are visitors from Stanford University on my site. So far, I’ve managed to find out that the hits are coming from their UNIX computer environment. It appears to be some kind of remote computing facility and engineering centers somewhere on the Stanford campus. There are even hits from their public computer lab as well. I wonder how they found out about this page.
