The Wardman Wire

The traffic pattern on the blog was different this week.

All figures used in this article are drawn from the “Slimstat” Wordpress plugin, and are quoted as “Unique Visitors”.

The normal pattern is that a high on Monday slowly falls down to about 15% fewer visitors on the Friday of the same week, subject to Bank Holidays and other one-off events. Recently, Monday traffic has grown from around 600 or so to around 800 or so, and then gradually fallen back.

This week the pattern has been different. It started on Monday at 794 unique visitors, and was up by about 15% by Friday. There was a 15% fall yesterday - which is a little less than usual, but also there was no post yesterday for the first time for a number of Saturdays.

Click the image to see the graph.

Recently traffic on the WW (Wardman Wire) has been ticking up at about 5-6% a week, but the pattern within the week has continued to be a peak on Monday followed by a decline - a fairly standard pattern for blogs.

There’s a nice little gaggle of UK Political Blogs developing on Blog Top Sites. Blog Top Sites is a categorised directory that also publishes rankings and their version of traffic figures to listed blogs every couple of hours.

It is also the only direct traffic comparison using the same service for a number of UK Political Blogs I have found (*), and can be motivational for some people. By my estimation, the figures are something like 60-70% below the numbers I get from my server statistics, but are fairly consistent and so can be used for a reasonable comparison.

A couple of weeks ago I did some detailed analysis comparing the different statistical systems I use on the blog here. To repeat a brief section:

1. I did some comparatives on 4 of the 5 stats systems I have in place, as described below (server log files, two Wordpress statistical plugins, and the Gostats web-based statistical system).
2. I measured “Unique Users”, “Visits” and “Page Impressions” (defined below).
3. The figures are taken, as I have mentioned, on reasonably large data sets of up to 9,000 to 18,000 unique visitors (depending which set of figures you believe) over the first 6 months of the life of the Wardman Wire.
4. The figures varied by the following factors (i.e., between the highest figure and the lowest).
   - Page Impressions: x14
   - User sessions: x6
   - Unique visitors: x2
5. The one caveat I will add is that the x14 and x8 are more likely to be x5 and x3 as my Gostats code is right at the bottom of the right hand sidebar, and so is often missed if visitors leave the page before the whole things has loaded.

I have made these changes to the blog to mitigate these points:

• Moved the Gostats code from the bottom of the page to the very top - which is why you now see the button at the top left.
• Reduced the number of postings on the front page.
• Reduced the number of items displayed in the “sidebar newsfeeds” from 4 to 2.

I will leave these changes in place for a month and see how it affects the comparative statistics.

I would welcome any comments that you may have.

In my statistics post yesterday, I promised to upload the spreadsheet with the figures.

You can download the spreadsheet http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/web-traffic-comparison-2007.xls.

This post compares my traffic figures on the Wardman Wire for September using four different analysis systems I have in place.

These figures are taken monthly over the life of the Wardman Wire from March 2007, and range from 2-3000 unique visitors per month up to around 10,000 to 15,000 per month.

I do the analysis and conclusions at the top of the article. The detailed graphs and data tables are at the bottom. I will upload the full spreadsheet with the detailed data over at Poliblog Perspective.

Just under a fortnight ago I looked at how the public profile of Mr Usmanov, the “strategic stakeholder” in Arsenal FC who now wants to buy the whole shooting match, has been vastly increased by schillings’ Reputation Management Lawyers attempts to reduce it.

I thought I would revisit the “Blog Buzz” charts to see if the story has retained its traction. Here they are. You can see that the buzz for both went down at the weekend - as we would expect - but that the interest is increasiung again three weeks after Mr Usmanov had Schillings start sabre-rattling against websites expressing their opinions.