Josh’s Anime Blog

Yes, it is here again…the post no one but I and a few other people in the known universe care about….the web stats post!

This month was a month of basking in glory of several days with over 100 hits a day…before crashing and burning by the end of the month (actually, it was more like a gradual decline. I have several theories as to why this was the case)

In any case, the stats:

Visits: 3,071 (+49.4%)
Page Views: 5,983 (+33.7%)
Unique Visitors: 2,187 (43.2%)

That translates into 99 visits a day (so close!), 193 pageviews a day, and 70.5 unique visitors a day.

In total, over the past two months, my improvements have been thus:

Visits: 107.5%
Page views: 61%
Unique Visitors: 91.7%

Pages per visit is down once again, falling from 2.17 last month to 1.95 this month.  This could partly be due to more people visiting, but doing so in a one-and-done fashion.

Now, as to why my numbers did what they did (I had 13 days with over 100 hits between October 3rd and October 17th, then dropped and stabilized to between 70 and 80 visits a day by the end of the month).

As some may recall, I took part in the ProBlogger contests at the start of the month.  I’m sure my leaving comments and the like on such a popular blog lead people to visit my site, and thus why my traffic was probably driven up at the start of the month.  Also, I’ve gotten a little behind on posting some of my episode reviews, which may cause people to not visit as often.

Since Blue Drop is the series which everyone seems to be visiting my blog about right now, and the fansub group who is doing that series has been a little slow, that could be adding to this.

Also, this is the first full month that I added a plugin which handles the google analytics code in such a way that I don’t get counted in the stats, which is nice since I’m not always sure how much of my traffic is me.

Due to the high traffic at the start of this month, I may get a drop in numbers in November, but I’ll still look back at the numbers in September and August to see how much I am improving, overall.

In any case, my top 5 days in October were:

1. Wednesday, October 3 (177)
2. Sunday, October 7 (170)
3. Friday, October 5 (137)
4. Thursday, October 4 (135)
5. Tuesday, October 9 (134)

The top 5 sites, other than search engines, from which I got traffic are:

1. Sea Slugs! Anime Blog (102)
2. Ani-Nouto (101)
3. ProBlogger (99)
4. Rollchan’s blog (68)
5. m33w Fansubs (54)

Last month I noted that I had gotten over 1,000 hits from Google Searches.  Well, that increased to 1,750 hits this month, with those searching for the show Blue Drop finally eclipsing those finding my Fall 2007 Anime Preview.

This month I add 10 more nations to the list of places that people visit from, increasing that list to 83 nations.  Eight nations get into the triple digit visits this month: The United States, Canada, the Philippines, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and the United Kingdom.  This month I got visits from 48 states and the District of Columbia (same on Montana and Wyoming - who is now an offender two months in a row).  Also, the number of states with double-digit visits increased to 26 this month.

The share of people who use Firefox to visit my site dropped, but still remains the majority at 51.7%.  IE still remains second and Opera third.   The number using Windows also dropped slightly, but is still an overwhelming majority at nearly 92%.

Finally, the top 5 visited posts (ie, not the homepage and not category or archived pages) are the following (I’m not sure how much this was effected by my changing the permalink structure mid-month, however):

1. Blue Drop - Episode 1 (132)
2. School Days - Episode 12 [END] (70)
3. CLANNAD - Episode 1 (59)
4. 7 Days of Prizes Giveaway (not from me though) (55)
5. Keeping Up A Good (anime) Blog (51)

Meanwhile, awstats says that my podcasts were downloaded 361 times last month.  Here are the top 5 episodes downloaded:

1. Episode 47 (62)
2. Episode 46 (45)
3. Episode 45 (33)
4. Episode 44 (23)
5. Episode 48 (16) - Note, this was released on the 30th.

Well, I guess it’s a good trend that, at least through episodes 44 and 47, the number of times it was downloaded increased for every episode.

Once again, it’s the monthly edition of the post that no one but I care about - the web stats post!  This time powered by Google Analytics!

This month was an interesting month as I think a certain editorial of mine plus starting to comment more on other anime blogs has finally started in my blog actually becoming known to people who live outside of my apartment (and I’m the only one who lives there), so that’s a good thing.

It’s hard to tell what my traffic for this month is compared to last because it’s both my first full month at a new host, and the first time I’m using Google Analytics, so absolutely no comparisons to past months this time.   Also, since this is a javascript based program, there are pluses and minuses.  The pluses are that any hits of mine in the admin area don’t count, only hits to actual pages.  The minuses include the fact that it won’t track things like how many times my podcasts are downloaded (I still have to look at awstats for that).

In any case, let’s look at August’s webstats:

Visits: 1,480 (That’s just under 48 a day)
Page Views: 3,715 (That’s just under 120 a day)
Pages per Visit: 2.51 (that’s a cool stat to have)
Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,141

My top 5 days as far as visits were:

1. Thursday, August 2 (84)
2. Wednesday, August 29 (81)
3. Friday, August 31 (76)
4. Wednesday, August 1 & Thursday, August 30 (71)
5. Friday, August 3 (64)

So basically the first 3, and the last 3 days of the month.

While it’s not surprising that most visitors visit only 1 page, and stay for only “0-10 seconds” - basically they hit the page, read it, then leave, I think I have a decent number of people who stay longer.  25% of visitors are listed as staying a minute or longer, with around 15% staying over 2 minutes, and nearly 10% staying for over 10 minutes (though, admittedly, how many of those are me, I don’t know).   Also, almost 40% of visitors visit 2 more more pages, with 25% visiting 3 or more, 16% visiting 4 or more, and 12% visiting 5 or more.

Thanks to my having my Otakon stuff linked to from the Otakon website, they were my #1 source of hits this month, followed by THAT Anime Blog, Sea Slugs! Anime Blog, and Neko Kyou’s Anime Blog (probably helped by the fact that the latter 2 now link to my blog. Yay!)

Other than the homepage and category pages, the most visited post, by far, was My Otakon 2007 Pictures post, with 189 pageviews.  This was followed by More on anime “pride” with 96 views, Fall 2007 Anime Preview with 82 views, and Why bother? with 74 views.   My most read episode review was School Days - Episode 08 with 55 views.

Not shockingly, most visitors were from the United States, with Canada coming in a clear 2nd.  The UK came in 3rd, with Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines, Germany, France, and Sweden all sending me several viewers (in order of most to least).

Within the United States, California sent my webpage the most viewers, followed by Virginia (where I am, just to note), New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Maryland, and Georgia.

For while I just kind of let my blog sit there, hoping people would come, but now I’ve been trying things like this Google Sitemap and trying to comment on other blogs more, and the like hoping to get more attention to this blog, and it seems to have somewhat worked, and I hope this trend continues.

Well, it’s that time again.  Time for that one post that no one but myself cares about, and shows just how few people actually know that this website exists!  It’s the webstats post!

I finally had some improvement in my numbers this month after a May in which apparently everyone forgot this site existed.  I brought in 985 unique visitors, up nearly 200 from last month.  Number of visits also increased by 450 to 2,440 and is actually the best for the site since January.   I also had the most page views, hits, and bandwidth usage so far this year, though that could be due to my redesign too.

Also, the number of people visiting on each day of the week became more stable (last month, IIRC, some days were very different).

Something I’m a little happy about, it seems that more people are visiting the site due to my writeups for Nagasarete Airantou (sorry for being slow! Episode 12 will be up today! I promise!).

In any case, I hope this proves to be an uptick in my stats.  Next months I won’t be able to compare to past months, however, as I move to a new server and domain name and move my podcasts to be directly part of this blog.  However, I hope that, if I’m able to do some reporting from Otakon, that this blog will get some attention for that as well.

Here a a graph of my blog traffic since my anime blog began (minus the one day in February 2006 that it existed and minus the current month):

You’ll notice a rather steady increase of traffic - which is good. The large jump in January 2007 is rather a mystery. I had a significantly large jump in traffic on the 14th and 15th of the month, were those two days made up around a third of the total visits for the month. Without those two days, January would fit in pretty nicely with the steady increase in traffic.

I’m not sure what caused this. This is well after the announcement of Haruhi being licensed in December (my post on the counter glitch, revealing the licensor did get linked by some people) and was before I found out my comments were broken on the old blogging software I was using then (so it wasn’t caused my my host and I repeatedly hitting the website trying to get it to work). Podcast Episode 7 was posted on the 13th, but I don’t see why a single podcast would make the visits jump that much.

In any case, taking into consideration this strangeness, and the fact that February was a short month, I’ve made steady progress, except for taking a big dip from May to June (possibly for not posting all that much during that period). After the June dip, I hit 500 “unique” visitors again in November, hit 1000 in January, and last month saw the most yet at over 1200. I’m on pace so far in April to beat March out for the most unique visitors.

For comparison, I’ve gotten about as much traffic 11 days into April as I did the entire month of October (I have more unique visitors but fewer visits). I already have more total visits this year as I did in all of 2006. (I also have more unique visitors, but since those are bounded by month, an annual count of unique visitors isn’t fully accurate).