Statistical Ego

January 06, 2004 | View Comments (13) | Category: Our Thoughts

Summary: The problem of always checking your site stats for your own ego.

There is a problem that I have that I must admit to. I constantly check my referrer logs and my stats for my sites. Constantly. It can be a problem. More so than email or IM. It helps though because looking at them encourages me to continue to do work here. It also gives me new ideas to try and get more people to come here. I wonder how the really big sites overcome this syndrome? Does anyone else have this problem?

Another thing I always wondered is what are the stats for your site? Like daily visits and what not? It is a difficult thing to answer only because different log analyzing software interprets things differently, but if you use awstats then maybe we could compare.

Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/96

Comments

#1

I haven't really looked at stats much.

It is fun to see who is visiting your site, from where, etc.

I just re-launched my site and installed textisms Refer script so maybe it will start tracking some incoming bogies.

check out http://www.jeremyflint.com if you have a spare minute.

Jeremy Flint (http://www.jeremyflint.com)

#2

I have the same problem. Constantly look at my stats.

donny (http://www.visualgui.com)

#3

I agree with Jeremy here. I've been using Textism's Refer for several months now. It helps me get an idea of who is searching for what, who's linking to me, and helps me track down spambots.

I check mine often, and often times click back through. Actually, that's how I came across Whitespace. I clicked through to someone's site that was linking to you. I've found all kinds of interesting websites this way, and my blog reading list keeps getting longer and longer.

Ryan Parman (http://www.skyzyx.com)

#4

Yeah I use Refer to check out what people are searching for. I have also come across some nice sites, some of them end up in the Vault.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#5

hey scrivs.

saw where you changed the white_space logo within the last hour.

looking good.

I have always been in favor of textual logos for some reason. maybe because i am a type nut.

looking good though.

Jeremy Flint (http://www.jeremyflint.com)

#6

I check my stats at least two to three times a day. In fact, I do it so much that I automated the process with a shell script that I call LogJammer:

http://www.bbrown.info/software/shell/LogJammer.cfm

If I ever remember to do a 2003 year-in-review log posting, I'll link to it here.

Bill Brown (http://www.bbrown.info/blogs/bblog/)

#7

I very rarely look at my stats anymore. I look at client stats, especially clickstreams and error reports. (clickstream reports are good for finding bad navigation choices, for example)

I look at the ones for my employer on a monthly basis, since that's when we run reports.

(btw, Paul, did you try that funnelweb software yet? )

We just did the report for last year for our primary website...

With all the images, css, and js files filtered out (so 'hits' are in effect 'pageviews' -- we only use frames in one place and no one ever goes there):

Duration (hh:mm:ss) 8759:57:06 (365 Days)
Total Hits 4,388,472
Total Cached Hits 412,217
Unique Visitors 146,581
Visitor Sessions 701,562
Average Visitors Per Hour 16.73
MB Transferred 23,935.64

Our most popular page by *far* is our 404 page, with 1.3 million hits. Gotta love refer spam -- oddly enough, well over a million of the referrals came from... let's just say the sorts of sites that don't usually promote legitimate financial institutions. Heh. And our #1 referer by a pretty good margin was an autoerotic asphyxiation site.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#8

Hi Scrivs,

You might be interested in this article I wrote:

http://www.cre8d-design.com/journal/archives/why_visit_length_statistics_are_meaningless.php

I check my referrers more than my hits, I find it interesting to check out who's linking up to me -- and Technorati is great for that too.

Rachel C (http://www.cre8d-design.com/journal/)

#9

Just last month I installed AwStats, I'm very addicted to checking my stats all day. Since I started my weblog I've seen my visitors grow and it motivates me to get better. Important to me are my referrers, rss readers and browser stats.

Darice (http://www.darice.org)

#10

Gotta say I'm an addict too. A couple of times a day (at least) I have a quick peek and see how my site's going.

I keep track of the visits and page views to get a general idea of how things are doing (and it's great to see things go up - down days are a bit upsetting.. uh-oh... I think I'm taking this too seriously...). It's partly because it's good to see your hard work is actually paying off and there are people out there benefitting from it. Maybe things would be different if the site wasn't doing well...

And then of course there are the referrals. Not only do I find some good sites, they often lead to comments about my own site and I like to read what people have to say about my work.

Patrick Griffiths (http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/)

#11

I rolled some PHP to log HTTP requests for individual entries and some indeces to MySQL. Using queries that filter out bots based on UserAgent values, and with a cookie on my own computer that excludes my own views (most of my site's traffic comes from me - sad), I can report an average of 71 unique users per day, and a total of 1290 unique users for all of time.

On my site, page-specific stats are shown in the masthead at the bottom of each page.

Tom Harpel (http://tandoku.com)

#12

I've got the same problem. Although my website generally doesn't generate much traffic I love seeing all the details I can about who's checking it out and all. Most of my traffic comes from google and its neat seeing what search terms people are using when they land on my site.

Mike (http://dayofthe.com)

#13

Honest - I was just thinking about this.

In fact, its on my "things-to-write-about-when-I-get-
time-but-probably-won't-because-I-
end-up-spending-time-with-my-wife-
and-kids-or-working-on-other-
paying-gigs" list.

I check all the time too. Its an addiction, and these are the evil cause:

tail -f /path/to/your/logfile

awk '/GET \/path\/tofile/ {print $11}' /path/to/your/logfile | sort | uniq -c |sort -nr

feather (http://www.wats.ca)

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