Statistics

Pepys Diary traffic statistics

Several people have asked me about how popular the site is but I’ve been too busy to write up the statistics (which I first looked at last weekend). You can see a chart showing the number of page views. Here’s how it happened…

The site launched on 26th December 2002 (for some reason data for the first couple of days is missing) by me telling some friends and linking to it from my site. Some of those friends linked to it from their sites and Ben Hammersley also picked it up. Boing Boing found it via Ben and from there so did a large number of other webloggers. BBC News asked me to write about the site on 30th December with the story appearing on 2nd January. The following day, just over a week after the site went live, Slashdot linked to the site and page views peaked at 87,037.

Since then traffic has settled down to around 13,500 page views per day (more on weekdays, less at weekends). To date there have been 1,378 annotations posted across the whole site, around 1,200 more than I anticipated. Thanks everyone!

15 comments | Permalink | Sunday 9 February 2003 | Statistics

Site traffic statistics

It’s been well over a year since I last looked at the traffic statistics for this site - to be honest I’m not overly concerned with getting huge numbers of visitors. Things seem to be going smoothly, with plenty of interesting annotations, and that’s what matters most.

But someone was asking me recently about the stats, so I’ve just analysed the logs, and here are the highlights for May 2004. According to webalizer, the site averaged 11,801 page views a day, with an average of 3,309 “visits”. This is slightly less that February last year, but that was close to the frenzied launch of the site - I’m surprised the figures are still so high to be honest! The most page views on a day was 22,863 on 8th May, and most visits was nearly 4,000 on a number of days. The totals for the month were 365,848 page views and 102,596 visits.

Up to today we’ve had 10,708 annotations to the diary and 2,490 in Background Info, for a total of 13,198.

20 comments | Permalink | Thursday 24 June 2004 | Statistics

Site statistics

A long time ago, possibly last year, I promised to round up some statistics about the site, such as the number of visitors. Sorry it’s taken so long, but here it finally is. As a point of comparison, here’s the first and possibly last time I wrote about this stuff.

Entries and annotations

The Diary section of the site currently has 2,053 entries (not all of them published yet) and 41,466 annotations (this figure doesn’t include spam annotations), so that’s an average of about 20 annotations per diary entry. Here’s a graph from Movable Type showing the number of annotations on diary entries over the past four months:

The Encyclopedia section features 3,049 topics (again, not all published), 1,724 of them people, and 6,791 annotations. Here’s the annotations graph for the Encyclopedia:

The In-Depth Articles and the Site News sections of the site have received 180 and 919 comments respectively making for a grand total of 49,356 across the whole site.

Every link from a Diary entry to an Encyclopedia topic creates a reference back to the Diary entry and there have been 30,581 of these to date.

Visitors, page views, etc.

According to Google Analytics, over the past month (29th June to 28th July) the site has had 25,378 Absolute Unique Visitors (ie, different people) visiting a total of 54,240 times for a total of 132,465 Pageviews.

Here are some graphs of daily statistics from May 2007, the earliest I have Google Analytics data for (click to see larger versions).

Visits:

Pageviews:

Average time on site:

And here’s a map indicating where Visits come from:

And data for the top 25 countries (according to number of Visits):

For those interested in such things, here’s a breakdown of which web browsers and operating systems are most popular here:

This is an indication of where traffic comes from:

(“Direct Traffic” is people who have bookmarked the site or type the URL in; “Search engines” is visits that came from someone searching on Google etc; and “Referring Sites” is visits that occurred by someone following a link from any other site to get here.)

Here are the top 25 things people searched for on search engines to get here (numbers in brackets are the number of visits for that search term over the past month):

1. pepys (1,163)
2. pepys diary (1,129)
3. samuel pepys (647)
4. diary (514)
5. samuel pepys diary (277)
6. pepysdiary (196)
7. trinity monday (168)
8. pepys diary online (165)
9. louise de queroelle (144)
10. whitehall palace (135)
11. “buttered ale” (121)
12. burgundy wine london 17th century (110)
13. pepysdiary.com (95)
14. elizabeth pepys (93)
15. www.pepysdiary.com (84)
16. lady castlemaine (77)
17. samuel pypes (69)
18. diary of samuel pepys (68)
19. samuel pepys sex (63)
20. samuel pepys diaries (56)
21. “william penn” pepys shitten (55)
22. the diary of samuel pepys (55)
23. nicolas barbon (53)
24. “cum salis grano” (48)
25. plague pepys (47)

RSS feeds and email

Finally, a summary of how many people read the site via RSS or email (possibly in addition to on the web). The main Diary feed has 2,461 subscribers, the Story So Far feed has 106 subscribers, the Encyclopedia 60 subscribers, Site News 72 and In-Depth Articles 59.

Here’s a graph showing the number of subscribers to the Diary feed since I started using FeedBurner to host the feeds in October 2007:

This is a break-down of how subscribers to the Diary feed have been reading it over the past month:

There are currently 131 people receiving daily Diary entries via email.

If there are any statistics you’d like to know which I’ve left out, do ask below and if they’re available I’ll update the post.

11 comments | Permalink | Tuesday 29 July 2008 | Statistics

Site statistics 2009

It’s been nearly a year and a half since I last shared some statistics about the site and the start of a new year seems a good time to look back, so here are the latest stats…

Diary, Encyclopedia and annotations

The Diary section of the site currently has 2,557 entries (not all of them published yet) and 49,008 annotations (this figure doesn’t include spam annotations), so that’s an average of about 19 annotations per diary entry (it was 20 last time). The main software used to catch spam annotations has caught 50,125 of them since it was first used around 18 months ago.

Here’s a graph from Movable Type showing the number of annotations posted each day on Diary entries over the past four months:

The Encyclopedia section features 3,589 topics (again, not all published), 2,037 of them people, and 711 of them featuring information from Wikipedia. A total of 7,351 annotations have been posted in the Encyclopedia, and here’s the graph of activity over the past four months:

The In-Depth Articles and the Site News sections of the site have received 212 and 1021 comments respectively making for a grand total of 57,592 across the whole site (8236 more than last time).

Every link from a Diary entry to an Encyclopedia topic creates a reference back to the Diary entry and there have been 39,174 of these to date.

Visitors, page views, etc.

According to Google Analytics, over the past month (4th December to 3rd January) the site has had 33,823 Absolute Unique Visitors (ie, different people) visiting a total of 63,963 times for a total of 151,565 Pageviews. Those figures are up on the same period a year ago: 7.31% for Unique Visitors, 7.30% for Visits and 11.25% for Pageviews.

Here are some graphs of daily statistics from 16th November 2005, the earliest I have Google Analytics data for (click to see larger versions).

Visits:

Pageviews:

I think the dip to zero is due to me making a temporary mistake with installing the Google Analytics script.

And here’s a map indicating where Visits came from during 2009 (813,143 visits from 209 countries/territories):

And data for the top 25 countries (according to number of Visits), also for 2009:

UPDATE: I’ve added the table below, from Google Analytics, which represents “Visitor Loyalty” for 7 Dec 2009 to 6 Jan 2010. While a large number of people have only visited once or twice, it’s interesting to see that around a third of Visitors visited an average of at least once a day or more.

For those of a technical bent, here’s a breakdown of which web browsers and operating systems are most popular here:

And this is an indication of where traffic comes from:

(“Direct Traffic” is people who have bookmarked the site or type the URL in; “Search engines” is visits that came from someone searching on Google etc; and “Referring Sites” is visits that occurred by someone following a link from any other site to get here.)

Here are the top 25 things people searched for on search engines to get here (numbers in brackets are the number of visits for that search term during 2009):

1. samuel pepys (23,386)
2. pepys diary (18,404)
3. samuel pepys diary (12,808)
4. pepys (11,276)
5. diary (2,811)
6. the diary of samuel pepys (1,886)
7. diary of samuel pepys (1,701)
8. diary entries (1,582)
9. pepysdiary (1,242)
10. pepys diary online (1,142)
11. noise of fiddlers (1,109)
12. pepysdiary.com (1,072)
13. peeps diary (1,044)
14. www.pepysdiary.com (928)
15. whitehall palace (898)
16. seething lane (866)
17. diary entry (858)
18. elizabeth pepys (769)
19. creechurch lane, synagogue (731)
20. diaries (715)
21. lady castlemaine (710)
22. pepys blog (707)
23. diary samuel pepys (639)
24. shipbuilder anthony deane (566)
25. samuel peeps (550)

RSS feeds and email

Next, a summary of how many people read the site via RSS or email (possibly in addition to on the web). The main Diary feed has 3,199 subscribers, the Story So Far feed has 123 subscribers, the Encyclopedia 56 subscribers, Site News 232 and In-Depth Articles 52.

Here’s a graph showing the number of subscribers to the Diary feed since I started using FeedBurner to host the feeds in October 2007:

And here are the most popular ways to read the RSS feeds over the past month:

1. Google Reader / iGoogle (1018)
2. LiveJournal (855)
3. Bloglines (393)
4. NewsGator Online (108)
5. FriendFeed (90)

Twitter

Since the last statistics post, Samuel has been posting snippets from the diary on Twitter. He’s posted 906 times, currently has 2510 followers, and is featured in 173 lists.

Time

Occasionally people ask how much time it takes to run this website, so in 2009 I kept track of the time I spent on it. It was a relatively quiet year as I didn’t add many new features or re-design anything major.

Here’s the breakdown of the total number of hours spent on various tasks over 2009:

Task	Hours
Preparing diary entries (including Twitter posts)	117.0
Adding pictures to hover “tool tip” links	12.0
Dealing with flagged annotations	5.0
Fixing truncated comments	4.5
Writing a script to automate posting to Twitter	3.5
General fixing of broken things	3.0
Publishing Story So Far summaries	1.5
Writing Site News	1.0
Publishing In-Depth Articles	0.5
Miscellaneous other tasks	2.5
Total	150.5

There were probably lots of little bits here and there I forgot to time but that’s about it for a quiet twelve months: 150.5 hours, or nearly four working weeks per year.

Thanks

Finally, as this is sort of a wrap-up of the past year I’d like to thank everyone for reading the site and to everyone who’s posted an annotation.

I’d also like to offer special thanks to three people:

• Terry Foreman, who has offered many corrections and suggestions to make the Encyclopedia and linking to it better.
• Jeannine Kerwin, who has continued to write the monthly Story So Far summaries.
• Max Wainer, who has been diligently alerting me to hundreds of annotations which were truncated by an old database move, only a fraction of which I’ve had time to fix so far.

Thanks again to everyone, and I hope 2010 (and 1667) is a good year for you all!

10 comments | Permalink | Monday 4 January 2010 | Statistics

Survey results

A week ago I put up a quick survey that asked three questions. I’ve since thought of more things I could have asked, but maybe we’ll do another sometime. Until then, here are the results based on the 400 people who completed the survey…

What was the “current” year when you started reading this site?

I was surprised how many people responding to the survey had been with the site since the first year: nearly a third! Everyone else was fairly evenly split regarding their “starting” year. A special hello to the 5% or so of you who have just started visiting this year!

Which age group are you in?

I suspected that visitors to the site were more mature than most websites, but I was surprised how few younger people visited. Not a bad thing, just interesting. 90% of respondents are age 40 or over, and nearly 50% are 60 or more. Two people said they were over 100, which is certainly possible…

Which country do you live in now?

It’s not a surprise that most visitors come from the United States, nearly 45% of you. 24% are from the UK, 10% from Canada, 5% Australia, 3% Germany, 2.5% Netherlands, and nearly 2% from New Zealand.

Three people each (0.75%) are from Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland and Switzerland. Two people each (0.5%) from Japan, Poland and Spain.

Finally, each of the following claimed one person: Argentina, Azerbaijan, Central African Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Gabon, Honduras, Israel, Italy, New Caledonia, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, United States Minor Outlying Islands, and Zimbabwe.

There’s no way to verify this of course, and much of the above is well within the margin of error. The graph below shows the countries that claimed three or more respondents:

So there we have it. Post below if you have any thoughts about the results, or if there’s anything else you’d like to know about your fellow diary readers, for next time!

11 comments | Permalink | Friday 25 February 2011 | Statistics