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This page belongs to a website based on the life and achievements of eighteenth-century
inventor Henry Cort. Please email site
controller Eric Alexander with any comments or queries. |
Visitor monitoring record
Significant statistics
Landmarks
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Site set up 1000 visitors 2000 visitors 3000 visitors 4000 visitors 5000 visitors 6000 visitors 7000 visitors 8000 visitors 9000 visitors 10000 visitors 11000 visitors 12000 visitors 13000 visitors 14000 visitors 15000 visitors |
24 July 2006 17 November 2006 5 February 2007 9 March 2007 8 May 2007 12 July 2007 10 September 2007 15 October 2007 14 November 2007 26 December 2007 2 February 2008 4 March 2008 13 April 2008 28 May 2008 18 July 2008 9 September 2008 |
Monthly totals: new visitors
Record for new visitors
per week: 284 for w/e 20 January 2008
Record for new visitors
per day: 112 on 14 February 2008
Previous record 66 !!
Record for a Sunday: 61 on
28 October 2007
On 13th October
2007 the number of visiting countries reached 100.
Countries visiting most
frequently are UK and USA.
Site monitoring program
I usually use check visits to
the site twice a day.
The options listed here are
the main pages available. Many have a
“drill down” facility, enabling me to see details of visits and visitors
registered.
The pages I use most are:
·
Summary (available yearly, quarterly, monthly,
weekly and daily)
·
Recent Visitor Activity
·
Country/State/City/ISP
·
Keyword Analysis
Summary data are retained for
an extended period. Data on other pages
is restricted to the last 100 pages of visits recorded.
Summary pages
Of the four columns of data
registered, the only one I find useful is for First Time Visitors, since
this should provide totals of visitors to the site. The figures are not totally reliable, as is explained on the
page.
Sometimes a visit covering
several pages is registered as several visits.
At other times, separate visits from the same visitor are registered as
one. To some extent these two anomalies
cancel each other out in registering totals.
A daily summary covering the last seven
days is called up automatically on entering the program. Data are retained for 30 days: a 30-day
display can be called up if required. I
use this page largely for record statistics.
Weekly figures are remembered for a period of 12 weeks. I check them each Monday. They keep pace with the monthly statistics
recorded above. For a period in 2008
the weekly visitor count regularly exceeded 200, but later in the year it fell
to around 140. The figure rarely drops
below 100.
Monthly figures are remembered over 12 months. I update the chart at the beginning of each
month, so that the monthly upload contains the most
recent monthly statistics.
I hardly ever look at the quarterly
summary.
The yearly figures cover all visits to the
site since its inception. I check them
regularly to obtain landmark totals.
Recent Visitor
Activity pages
The “0 seconds” registered
for visit length is standard when the number of entries is
1. This is because the program cannot determine
the time when a visit ends. Likewise
the time registered for a multi-page visit does not take account of the how
long the visitor spends on the final page.
Although the majority of
visits cover one page only, occasional ones reach 40 or more. On one occasion (19 April 2008) there may have been a visit of
over 100 pages. What I observed was a
display of 92 page loads and 8 pages from later visits. I may therefore have missed earlier visits
the same day.
“Location” usually specifies region (or state) and city,
as well as country.
Although the referring URL may be another page from this
website, or another site that links to this one, the main mode of access is Web
search.
There have been some strange anomalies about my own visits to
the site. Some used to be
registered as from Reston, Virginia, presumably because I am an AOL user: the
number of these visits reached its maximum of 255 many months ago. Another set of visits, deemed then to have
come from an unidentified location in UK, appear to include occasions when I
alter pages on my website, even when I don’t upload them: their number is
approaching 200.
A few weeks ago, the broadband router on my computer was
changed. “Reston” visits thereupon
ceased: all visits were deemed to be from UK, apparently because I am now
identified as a Carphone Warehouse user (presumably this change affects all
AOL’s British users). Within UK,
location has varied: London, Stoke-on-Trent, Manchester and Leicester have all
featured, but not High Wycombe where I live!
On one occasion when some of my registered visits included both
locations, I tried drilling down, with the following results:
Country/State/City/ISP
pages
An extreme example of anomaly
is given in the illustration below, obtained by drilling down US visits over
26-27 July 2008 (data from interspersed visits has been removed to emphasise
the effect). It is apparent from the
identity of “os” and resolution, and the similarity of IP address, that these
visits, though registered as separate, are from the same visitor. This anomaly gave rise to a spurious total
of visits recorded, which was unusually high (39) for a Saturday (26 July). “Recent Keyword Activity” for the same
series of visits is shown later on this page.
Other anomalies include
difference between the country identified on the “country” page and that on the
“visitor activity” page for the same visit!
I assume this arises when the “host” country differs from the ISP’s. Some visits are listed as “unknown” on the
country page, yet it is possible to identify the actual country by drilling
down.
On the Country page (unlike “Recent Visitor Activity”), all my
visits are deemed to be from an unknown country. But for State, City and ISP they don’t register at all.
Keyword Analysis page
Two examples of search terms
used by visitors…
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5 November 2007
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15 February 2008
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I rarely visit the “Recent
Keyword Activity” pages, but I used them to prepare an illustration of the
extraordinary series of search terms used for the anomalous US visits of 26-27
July 2008 (already illustrated for the Country page).
Was the visitor aiming at this website? The time lapse between searches suggests
not. But it is extraordinary that, despite
the same search term (“henry” in particular) being used on several occasions, a
different page was alighted on for each of the 28 searches. It is also inexplicable that the count for
this activity on the Country page is only 15.
Not included in the illustrations above are further visits from the same
visitor on later days.
Purposes of visits
An overview is not immediately apparent on any of the monitoring
pages, but their data can be analysed to give a fair indication. I have tried such an analysis only once to
date, selecting 100 consecutive visits over the period 10-14 July 2007. I classified visits into four categories:
·
Dedicated, covering direct access to
site, access via links, and searches for “Henry Cort” or “puddling”;
·
Iron-related, covering searches for
iron-related people, processes etc.
·
Other
features, for
searches on matters deliberately covered in the website, e.g. “Becher”, “Arethusa” etc.
·
Accidental, when a combination of words
in the search term happens to match a combination on the site.
The
result on that occasion was:
Dedicated 40
Iron-related 9
Other featured
33
Accidental
18
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