The Wardman Wire

Now that I have the links between my different websites in place, I have been looking at the amount of traffic being generated over the last month, and the most popular articles.

Total Raw Traffic

On this occasion I’ve processed all the raw log files using the free version of a utility called Deep Log Analyser, rather than relying on the data generated by a Wordpress Plugin.

However, once caveat is that at least 4 of the sites (those which aggregate Parliamentary blogs - www.senedd.me.uk, www.holyrood.me.uk, www.europarl.me.uk and www.parliament.me.uk) are all less than a week old. So I have had to include some judicious estimates in the figures.

Another difference is that certain files that are not part of the Wordpress installation are included in the numbers. The raw total of page impressions is 376,000 across all the 13 sites (the twelve in the toolbar and www.mattwardman.co.uk). More than half of these relate to www.mattwardman.com.

The Impact of Files that shouldn’t count

These are the top 5 files listed for www.mattwardman.com and what they are:

Page Views - Filename - What is it?

1. 14,880 Page Views. polls-js.php.This is used for in page polls which are refreshed without reloading the page. This should be excluded.
2. 14,452 Page Views. podpress_js.phpPart of the Podpress wordpress plugin. Not actually used on this blog. I should really find a way to exclude this.
3. 13,872 Page Views. /blog/feed/index.phpThis is the home page for the RSS feed. This could be included or excluded depending on which statistics I am interested in.
4. 11,747 Page Views. clickmanager.cgiThis is the redirector programme “bounced off” when I need to count clicks on a link. This indicates 11,747 clicks on links in 30 days. I use it, for example, to count the clicks on the toolbar (hover over a button and see the “double” web address), and the clicks on stories in the Daily Roundup. This should be excluded.
5. 10,710 Page Views. /blog/index.phpAt last one that counts. This is the Blog home page. It counts for very few impressions out of the total. I will return to this - it is a sign of how important blog archives are for attracting traffic.

So - just to exclude 4 of these top 5 reduces the traffic to www.mattwardman.com by roughly 50,000 page impressions over the raw log files. Counting from inside Wordpress are cleaner, but still have a lot of “gunge” in the data.

So what is a Reasonable Total?

I am happy to quote a total number of page impressions for this 30 day period of “around 250,000” - a reduction of a third. But having done that - 250,000 page impressions in a month on a set of sites that are mainly only 8 months old is OK.

The figure for the main www.mattwardman.com site is around 130,000-140,000 page impressions (with approximately another 30,000 or so for www.mattwardman.co.uk). These figures themselves roughly tally with the numbers given by the Slimstat-EX Wordpress plugin (140,000 and 35,000 respectively - also probably containing some search crawling).

The Real Top Ten Pages on www.mattwardman.com

After filtering out the noise, the following are the Top Twelve pages on the site in the last 30 days. Go and have a look at the links, and write down your conclusions - then read my notes below.

Page Views - Date - Title and Link

1. 3942 Page Views - 20070912 - In memory of free speech - Jesus and Mo - serious
2. 3825 Page Views - 20070501 - Double Trouble - Posh Spice and Ananova - humour, morning funny
3. 2130 Page Views - 20071010 - Wordpress Plugin - Category Images - tech tip
4. 1616 Page Views - 20080213 - ABC Rowan Firestorm was started by the BBC - serious analysis
5. 1422 Page Views - 20070904 - New Scottish Government launches official website - satirical
6. 1280 Page Views - 20070905 - This posting may contain nuts - serious but funny - health and safety series
7. 998 Page Views - 20070404 - Double Trouble - Guido Fawkes and Zorro - humour, morning funny
8. 995 Page Views - 20070411 - Double Trouble - Morgan Lifecar and Thomas the Tank Engines - humour, morning funny
9. 849 Page Views - 20071016 - Lib Dem leadership contest to replace Ming Campbell - humour, Lib Dems = box of ferrets
10. 817 Page Views - 20070609 - Video Game Battle between Sony and Church of England - serious analysis
11. 812 Page Views - 20080211 - Britblog Roundup - Ideas for Avoiding the Archbishop - serious
12. 709 Page Views - 20070815 - Do Health and Safety Professionals Get too Much of a Kicking - serious - health and safety series

Matt’s Notes on this List

My top 6 non-obvious insights into this list:

1 - These are the ages of the posts in months, from top to bottom:

• 5 months
• 10 months
• 4 months
• Two weeks
• 5 months
• 5 months
• 10 months
• 10 months
• 4 months
• 8 months
• Two weeks
• 6 months

i.e., posts take time to mature, and archives are very, very important. Go back to your blog and make your archives easily accessible for users and search engines - it matters to the gradual growth of your blog. Have a look at how many ways in to the archives there are on www.mattwardman.com.

2 - There is an almost equal division between large, serious posts and shorter humorous ones - with most of the posts on this list being in longer series. Click on them and check, then start being a bit more organised in your blogging if you want to build up your site.

3 - People are still very interested in Guido’s road accident on Newsnight.

4 - Two of my three posts that have ever been linked from Comment is Free “Best of the Web” section are in this list - Numbers 10 and 11. 11 was linked during the period under consideration. Best of the Web gives a long term benefit.

5 - Post 9 is short and compares the Lib Dems to a box of ferrets. I’ll lay odds that visitors are looking for ferrets not Lib-Dems.

6 - If I edit these posts and the next few down the list, I can find the “entry point” for much of my traffic and encourage them to find other articles of interest.

7 - Together these posts account for as many readers as the blog front page.

Your Homework

I’m planning a far more exhaustive version of this post for Saturday on Poliblog Perspective, when I will be listing all posts that have received more than 100 visitors in the last 30 days - and drawing some conclusions.

Between now and then have a look at your recent visitors, and see which posts they accessing.

What percentage of recent visitors come to your site via your archives? It can be as simple as looking at the “entry pages” for your most recent visitors. If you don’t have it to hand, do the exercise for Pickled Politics or Problogger - both of whom have open counters.

Then visit Poliblog Perspective on Saturday. Make sure you get the article by subscribing to the feed.

Wrapping-Up

After all that, don’t forget that all these numbers were Page Impressions - which are themselves an inconsistent measurement that, as I have explored in this article, need to be interpreted with rather more than a pinch of salt.

Tags: visitors, archibes, poliblog perspective, top articles, wardman wire[tags]visitors, archibes, poliblog perspective, top articles, wardman wire[/tags]