Monday, May 14, 2007

Stat summary of visitors: the first 21 months

General curiosity and a desire to use Google Docs' chart feature have led me to this point. I created the Google Docs charts by downloading the raw data from StatCounter and then plotting from a spreadsheet. Google Docs saves these charts in .png format and they are less than 6kb apiece.

I signed up for a Blogger account in August 2005 in order to comment with an identity on my friend Eric's blog before he migrated to using TypePad. The first thing I felt a desire to blog about was my trip to Seattle, WA with some friends to attend Penny Arcade's Penny Arcade Expo 2005.

So, a brief summary of some numbers as of May 2007:

Total pageloads: 5,327
Average # of
pageloads per month: 242

Total unique visitors: 4,080
Average # of
unique visitors per month: 185

The first big spike is January 2006, which was Howard Stern's debut on SIRIUS satellite radio, garnering 326 unique visitors that month. The middle spike is July 2006 with 321 uniques. I'm not sure what happened then, but I posted about having not posted for almost a month and also about Carson Daly, so obviously something else was going on.

The last spike is December 2006 with 325 uniques. Howard Stern went on a Christmas TV media promotional blitz for SIRIUS and I posted his appearances. Other than huge events that I specifically wrote about and others specifically searched for, it is difficult to make many correlations with this data, but I still love seeing the numbers in vibrant color form. I can see the search terms that visitors used to reach my site, but only for the 100 most recent visitors. This is only because I use the free version of StatCounter and not due to any deficiency in the stat code or its featureset.

Just for fun, here is the data broken down by quarter. This chart and the one above are from Google Docs:
For comparison, here is a graph of the same data from StatCounter:


Related post: Using Google Docs

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