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Traffic on the AO Website- March 2004. The last time I reported on the traffic on the AO website was back in 2002, looking back over the year 2001. We have moved the site from Yahoo as a host to Ipowerweb, and adopted some different statistical tracking tools. Before we could see only what the most popular sites were. Now we can see not only how often each page on our website gets looked at, but also how long it was looked at at a given moment in time, what pages people enter and leave the web-site on, a detailed account of each use of the website and what sites link to AO, how people get to the site in the first place. Here is a list of the most commonly looked at pages during February-March 2004.
As expected, our home page has the most hits. One of the interesting things to happen is that some of our articles are the only source on the web, and are directly linked to by other sites. For example, the article from the New York Times on "Girls Just Want to Be Mean" has been cited on a popular web-log (blog) and in a movie review, and has become the second most frequented page on our site, replacing the transgender theory article "guyinadress" which had held that position for several years. We’ve also been linked to from a weblog on intellectual property, and a site devoted to teaching square danceing (see box). An obvious question is, if someone comes and reads the article on "Mean girls" do they stay and look at anything else on the site? Here’s what we learn:
Page /webmistress_choices/girls_just_want_to_be_mean.htmVisits: 815, Avg visit time (secs): 203.82 /web_rpt.htm">Back to IndexTop 10 Input hrefs
Top 10 Output hrefs
The answer to that question is clearly no. Of 814 people looking at that page, 638 (78.28%) exit immediately from the website. Some 9% re-enter the article for some reason, and only a very few explore the website to any extent. How do people get to the AO website? Most of the time we don’t know. The vast majority seem to come directly into the web-site. The second most frequent source of hits is the major search engines, google and DMOZ in particular. There are a couple of startling findings in this list. We get a large number of hits from a dog breeding site and a Hong Kong Religious School. (I’ve removed the direct references because I suspect someone with site access at these places is interested in our site, and I don’t want to accidently "out" them by providing a reference to the organization directly. One place where we get a lot of hits that surprises me a bit is from Amy Bloom’s website. I’m surprised because of how critical I am of Ms. Bloom’s books and articles. What is linked to is a copy of a New York Times article about her book. When I learned of this linkage, I added a preamble to the article, encouraging people to look at other material on Ms. Bloom that I’ve collected on the web site and to learn more about us than just what Amy Bloom says. Was this successful? Here are the incoming hits showing people coming in from Amy Bloom’s web site.
Top 10 Output hrefs
Here we see that a far lower percentage exit immediately. I’m still tinkering with this to see if I can direct more people exploring Amy Bloom’s work into other areas on our site. I’ll finish my comments with a note that we can observe how people use the website. Here are some samples of how a visit to our website looks: Visitor censored URL came at 3/29/2004 3:38:26 PM &fr=my_top and visited pages: /whoweare.htm 23.00 /bookstor/bookstor.htm 62.00 /bookstor/bookstoreDVDs.htm 46.00 /bookstor/bookstoreDVDs.htm 12.00 /bookstor/bookstoreDVDs.htm 22.00 / bookstor/bookstoreDVDs.htm 56.00 /bookstor/bookstor.htm 6.00 /whoweare.htm Visitor censored URL came at 3/30/2004 4:13:37 AMwith agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) from http://search.cometsystems.com/search.php?qry=Cleveland Crossdresser Clubs &origin=csearch&tmpl=0Aen& start=10 and visited pages: /silhouette/2003/April%202003.htm 81.00 /index.html 68.00 /whoweare.htm 204.00 /index.html 10.00 /silhouette/2003/April%202003.htm 0.00 Each page visited is listed, although I think that not everything is picked up. For example, there is no way to get from our home page to the April 2003 issue of the newsletter directly...you have to click through a Newsletter main page...yet that page isn’t reported in the second example. Please note that none of this data can be linked to an individual. To be extended. Topics to be covered Current search terms, Picosearch, guestbook.
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