Slick made a comment on my earlier post regarding the unexplained blip in my blog visits saying that he planned to go to my site and hit refresh repeatedly to pad my sitemeter stats, but only on my birthday. This reminded me that I haven't checked my traffic in a few days so I took a peek over at the recent reports and was shocked once again. To review, the peak was last Tuesday and after dropping slightly (though still at a good level) on Wednesday, my daily numbers plummeted on Thursday, Friday and Saturday - dropping to half the pre-blip levels.
Then the mysterious occurred. Sunday the 25th my visits skyrocketed to more than 60% above the previous surge while in just 14 hours, today's totals rival those of the now less-than-impressive blip last Tuesday! Since my most recent post prior this one was on Thursday, the beginning of the downturn, I am seriously befuddled as to why some days I have only a dozen visitors and the next I have close to 200. Please let me know if you have any theories about this cyber-enigma.
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Question: does sitemeter say it logs every hit or every hit from a unique source? If it's just setup to log every hit regardless of the IP/source, that's how you could be getting some big numbers...i.e. if someone went through some pics or was clicking around, every click may count as a visit.
ReplyDeleteThe days that you have blips...are these days that you've posted new topics? That is, could it be you triggering some numbers?
If your blog shows up on Google, it's probably from there. People searched for some topic, and came to your site via Google...then probably left when they saw it was a blog.
Or, sitemeter just may be plain crap.
Good questions.
ReplyDeleteHere's what I know. If a person goes to my blog and hops around from post to post, reads a few things and leaves a comment, that counts as 1 visit and is listed along with the time spent on my blog and how many pages they actually visited. Thus a single visit by a viewer who stays on my site, regardless of how many separate pages they view, is only counted once.
Conversely, if a single viewer visits my site 20 times during a day to check for new content, each instance is logged separately. That said, I can tell if this is the case as their IP address shows up repeatedly on the list of visitors.
As to them corresponding to new posts, I thought of that but discounted it. On my first "blip day" I had recently posted on AIDS. Thinking this topic might have caused the surge, I checked the visitors "reference page" which is the source that led them to my site. Ironically, I found none that were searching for AIDS related content.
My best guess at this point is that as I post more often, my blog gets more "credibility" in the sense that I have a larger cyber-footprint. Then when someone searches a topic that I have discussed, Google is puts it higher on the list, thus making it more likely to be checked by the searcher.
That's my only theory.
I found out yesterday that my #1 hit is for the image of a Mexican flag that I used in a post in June! The fact that people are only now find this supports my above "footprint" theory.