Philofaxy - Visitor Statistics

This post was prompted by Nickie's comment:

'The fact that it's [Philofaxy has] not been discovered by enough people (yet)!' 

We use Google Analytics to gather stats on visitors to the blog, we have been collecting stats since about August last year.

The key figures I have been looking at are the number of New Visitors, the number of Returning Visitors and the number of Pageviews. The stats also show us the most frequently visited pages and where people are coming from when they land on the site.

These terms are defined as follows:

New Visitor - Google Analytics records a visitor as 'new' when any page on your site has been accessed for the first time by a web browser. This is accomplished by setting a first-party cookie on that browser. Thus, new visitors are not identified by the personal information they provide on your site, but are rather uniquely identified by the web browser they used.

Returning Visitor  - Google Analytics records a visitor as 'returning' when the _utma cookie for your domain exists on the browser accessing your site.

Visitor - A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website's perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.

All Visits is therefore the addition of New Visitors and Returning Visitors

Pageviews -  A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser. Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed. The tracking code is part of the Blogger website template structure.

Here is a chart of the figures for the last 12 months, click on the picture to see it full size.

As you can see the number of visitors has increased and there is also a step in the figures in June which I think I can explain.

On 21 June Gala Darling did a blog post about her love of Filofax and mentioned Philofaxy in her post as being 'hardcore'. Well that was the day our stats went crazy.  

Starting on the 13th June to give you a typical picture:

Our new visitors out numbered returning visitors by 2:1, but things soon restored to normal after a couple of days. But all of a sudden Philofaxy had been discovered by a lot of new people and our pageviews took a sharp rise. This was during a month when the number of new posts on the site was fairly low (14 posts).

Since June our number of returning visitors has continued a small gradual increase each month and likewise the number of pageviews each month has slightly increased. But if you compare the last three months with 12 months ago our traffic levels show about a three times increase and it also looks as if it's a sustained increase.

So how does this compare to other sites. Well I only have access to data for other sites I run and to ones run by my son.

My other major site in terms of visitors is Pembury.org that site is based on the village I used to live in back in UK, and I created the site over 10-11 years ago.  The site traffic has remained the same for the last few years. It typically gets about 1000 visits per month.

My son's site is Thunderbolt which is a games review site it has about 100,000 visits per month! He's been doing that for 10 years, starting at the tender age of 13, but he now has 30 people contributing reviews dotted around the world.

So Philofaxy is somewhere between the two.

I showed the stats on Google to my son the other day and he was quite impressed considering the niche product we are writing about and also the type of product ie it's not electronic at all. Nope it certainly isn't that.

I put some of our increased traffic down to our increased presence on the web through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr. These are all things that will help people discover Philofaxy and encourage them to return when there are new things to read.

Having new things to read of course is essential for the life of any blog, so a big thank you to everyone who contributes with ideas, articles, comments, suggestions, photos, messages of support and thanks. You all play a part no matter how small in making Philofaxy as successful as it is today... so long may it continue.

OK enough on stats... back to proper Filofax posts again... thank you for your time on reading to the very end of this post.

Steve