May 25 2007
visitors might not be people
Blog statistics below courtesy of Google Analytics. Google Analytics’ glossary defines visitors as:
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.
The method, heuristic, that Google Analytic employs to identify visitors is not detailed. The Google Analytics graph of :: Wendy House :: visitors below covers a ‘normal’ calendar month and suggests that between April and May 23rd:
- 600-ish visitors were sent by search engines.
- 60-ish visitors return* several times per month. Many friends and family are in this group.
- 40-ish visitors return on a daily basis. If this is ‘people’ what troopers you are!
- 10-ish visitors, and me, return twice a day. Given that I regularly post only once per day 2 visits is a tad perplexing.
- no-one visits between 101-200 times per calendar month, how odd is that? As odd as a snake wearing a beanie in a wheelbarrow race, that’s how odd.
- 100-ish visitors return over 200 times in one calendar month. Super Snoopers! Now thats just SILLY. I don’t believe it. I wonder what this number really suggests…
*return = becomes active after more than 30 minutes inactivity in the Wendy House.
visitors might not be people
