Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics
My goodness, NorthumberlandView.ca just keeps getting more and more popular. The biggest problem with the site’s popularity seems to be the fact that I have to keep updating the Advertising Rate Card to show how many people are visiting the site.
On an average day, about 850 different people are visiting NorthumberlandView.ca (or, over 25,000 per month). Now this can be a bit tricky, as the number of visitors is determined by the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the visitor. Your IP address is the digital equivalent to your home address. The problem with this, in one home, on one IP address, you could have multiple computers, all visiting the site. So for example, you could have Grandma playing the brand new Crossword puzzle on one computer, little Johnny checking out what happened at Brighton Speedway over the weekend and Mom looking to see what’s happening this week with NorthumberlandView.ca’s Events Calendar, but because they’re all using the same Wi Fi in their house, it only shows up as one visitor.
A better indication of NorthumberlandView.ca’s popularity is the number of Page Views. On average, 8,395.83 Page Views are registered each and every day, this amounts to over 251,000 Page Views every month. A Page View is simply that, the number of pages on the site that are seen each day. Visiting the Home Page counts as one page view, if you click on one of the articles, that counts as another page view.
Probably the least reliable indicator for a site’s popularity is the number of hits. Some people will say, “Yeah, my website’s getting 5,000 hits a day” (NorthumberlandView.ca’s getting about 17,000 hits per day, or over half a million hits per month). Well that’s nice, but the problem with hits is the fact that every time your website shows up in a search, that counts as a hit. So for example, if someone goes to their favourite search engine, does a search for, let’s say, “Head Cheese” (simply because there has been a recall recently and it just popped into my head), NorthumberlandView.ca will show up in the search results. They may not click on the article that was posted at the site but it will still count as a hit because it showed up in the results.
I’m always fascinated by how people get to NorthumberlandView.ca. While most come from bookmarks, search engines, links on local websites or social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc), sometimes there are links to the site in the most unexpected places. I was looking through the traffic statistics and in June, for some reason, I got about 400 page views from a website called Nigeria Master Web, a portal website in Nigeria.
Another interesting bit of information that you can get from your statistics (which, if you have a website, I would highly recommend you review on a semi-regular basis) is keywords and key phrases that are used to find your site. Checking my stats, it seems that a lot of people arrived at NorthumberlandView.ca by searching for Ontario Savings Bonds, Tim Hudak, the Northumberland Hills Hospital, CDCI East, the Cobourg Highland Games and the recent Tornado in Midland.
Finally, I just wanted to mention the fact that because it’s online, NorthumberlandView.ca has a global reach. While the vast majority of visitors are from Canada (mostly in Ontario), visitors come to the site from all over the world. Americans are the second most frequent visitor, followed by the British, Germans and Russians. Here’s one way to look at it. If you’re from Northumberland County and you’ve moved away, you’d still like to know what’s going on in your old stomping grounds, right? Or, if you’re a tourist and you’re looking for some information on where you’re going to take your next vacation, where better to look?
