Some stats

As it's a rainy miserable day today, I just thought I bore you with some stats re. my blog. I had signed up for a 1 month free trial with http://www.web-stat.net/. I've had that little world map on my side bar for a while, but it told me was a country break down of the visitors to my blog and I had always wondered who these people were who visited from the more exotic locations around the world and how they found me. Web Stat gave me much more info and it was quite revealing. It may be interesting for some other bloggers out there. I don't think I need to know these stats all the time, so won't bother paying for this service, but the 1 month trial was interesting and I recommend it.

In the period from the end of August to yesterday I had a total of 872 hits on my blog by a total of 395 different people.

12th of September was the busiest day with 51 hits. It was the day I published the post on toothpaste, obviously a popular subject. The quietest day was the 3rd September with 7 hits, after I hadn't posted anything for almost a fortnight.

Visits are fairly equally spread over the week, with most days receiving around 15% of visits, except for Friday which is the quietest day of any week with only 11.5% of traffic.

The site even tells you about the busiest hours of the day, which is between 7 and 8 pm local time, reflecting the time Europeans are most likely to be on their pc's. The quietest times consequently are in the wee hours of the morning.

The majority of visitors come via direct access, i.e. my site is logged onto their favourites. Of the referrals from other web-sites, this makes interesting reading. Here is the top 8 for last month:

1. blogger.com 16.5%
2. subsistencepatternfoodgarden.blogspot.com 14%
3. google.uk 9.1%
4. contadina.wordpress.com 6.3%
5. lettersfromusedom.blogspot.com 5.3%
6. google.de 2.8%
7. olives-and-artichokes.blogspot.com 2.1%
8. jamjaragain.blogspot.com 2.1%

So as you can see there is traffic between bloggers, some will no doubt have been from the blog authors themselves though.

Now as far as key search words was concerned, this was possibly the most revealing. I have no exact stats without combing through each entry, because every time a slightly different combination is used it counts it separately, but here are the top 5 search words used by which Google and other seach engines direct people onto my blog:

• self sufficiency (yes, that's good, although someone from Salt Lake City, Utah was particularly interested in self-sufficiency in the last days... :D )
• Brutta Figura (I hope I could help some people understand Italian better)
• strawberry tree (again, hope they found my post on the subject last year useful)
• courgettes (ditto)
• but by far the mostly used word for finding my web-site from many of the more exotic locations such as Kuwait, Indonesia, Egypt and Colombia... I daren't write the word lest I attract more unwanted traffic so I'll spell it: N. U. D.. E. I posted something a couple of years ago on me refreshing myself in a wild river in the all together, which as I had predicted at the time has become my most popular evergreen page! The word is usually accompanied by s w i m m i n g, but also some more exotic ones came up such as a f r o c a r r i b e a n or d w a r f m e n. I'm sure those visitors were very disappointed when they arrived on my site.
  

So bloggers out there, if you notice the odd exotic visitor to your site, they've probably just been mis-directed!

And talking about exotic visitors, this is an easier map to see from which countries visitors to my site have come




These dots show individual hits in the last month:

There were visitors from 49 separate contries. Here are the top 10 (for last month only):

1. UK 20.1%
2. Italy 19.6% (not all of it myself!)
   
3. USA 18.9%
4. Germany 16.8% (This is slightly distorted, more of that later...)
   
5. France 4.9%
6. Netherlands 2.8%
7. Australia 2.4%
8. Russia 1.9%
9. Canada 1.9%
10. Trinidad & Tobago 1.2% (Sharon?)

There are a couple of distortions due to some individuals, including myself hitting the site rather often. I feel I might have to give out an award to the most visiting person. I can see her already starting to blush...

Web-Stat not only breaks visitors down by country, but also region. Here the top 10 regions:

1. Bayern, Germany 15.3% (I can see a pattern emerging...)
2. Liguria, Italy 9.5% (about half of that will be myself, I'd say)
3. n/a, GB 4% (Somone follows me from a provider called America Online in the UK, I wonder who that is? It won't specify a region)
4. Idaho, USA 3.6% (Not only you, Mr H. :) )
5. Puglia, Italy 3.5%
6. Northamptonshire, GB 3.4%
7. Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur France 2.6%
8. California 2.6%
9. Tuscany 2.4%
10. New York State 1.9%

Over 300 different cities and towns have been registered. This is not always accurate. I will sometimes come under La Spezia, other times as Genoa and other times as something else. But here it comes anyway, the top 10:

1. Augsburg, Bayern, Germany 11.8% (and the top award of most frequent visitor goes to... ENGELWURZ!!! By the way I haven't had an e-mail from you for a long time)
   
2. Genoa Liguria, Italy 4.9%
3. Post Falls, Idaho 3.5%
4. Northampton, GB 3.4% (Hello James & Alison!)
   
5. Fivizzano, Tuscany, Italy 2.5% (a small town near us
   
6. Arles, France 2.3% (Hi Babette! Welcome back from your pilgrimmage.)
   
7. Amsterdam?) 1.7% (my family live mostly in Rotterdam, so don't know who there is in Amsterdam)
   
8. Carluke, Scotland 1.6% (Can't think of anyone I know around there...?)
   
9. Codiponte, Italy 1.6% (Another little place nearby)
   
10. Corato, Puglia 1.4% (Ciao Contadina)

Right enough of that. Next time I'll be back to proper posts.