nusculus.com Statistics

These statistics are for the 2 year period of January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013. There were 7580 visits in that time, which is over 300 visits per month. Most of those seem to be for the WRF and research related parts of the site. There are also some related to floating down the local river, which is a popular summer activity. Some visits seem to be mistakes. I found it interesting how my web site is used. If you happen to be putting together a website about WRF, or perhaps some other topic, it may help you understand how to make your site more useful by making it more findable. I added a new page with information and helpful tips for floating the local river after I noticed how many people were finding the page about me floating it. Using their search words, I was able to determine what would be interesting to them and used that to organize the information rather than spread it out over the page about me. That page was the cause of increased visits during July and August 2013. (That page received over 1000 visits - 92.6% were new visits, 2.66 pages per visit, and 1.25 minutes per visit. )

Here is a summary of the language setting in the browsers used to visit this site: Language2012-2013.pdf. As one might expect, most of the visits are English, especially U.S.A. English. The graph across the top of this report also shows the distribution of the visits over time. There are no huge spikes or long lulls, so interest seems relatively steady. But as mentioned, there was a noticeable increase in July/August 2013 related to floating the Boise River. The summary near the top also indicates that an average of 3.76 pages are viewed per visit and 7.75 minutes are spent on the site. And since only 70% of the visits are new, meaning that 30% are returning visits, some people seem to be finding useful information.

However, this report on the "engagement" of the viewers shows that many visits are very short, under 10 seconds: Engagement2012-2013.pdf. When looking more closely into different reports, many visits are reported as zero seconds. I suppose that could mean that the analytics was not able to capture the actual length of the visit, but I suspect other reasons. Perhaps the browser preloads pages that are found by a search engine. If so, the page may not actually be viewed. And of course, the web crawlers that find pages load a page for only an instant while it gathers the text and links to other pages. This makes the 315 visits per month seem less impressive.

And here is a summary of the countries of the visitors: Location2012-2013.pdf. There are 111 countries listed, plus a couple from "unset" country. Again, there is no surprise that U.S.A. is the source of most of the visits to a site created by a guy from the U.S.A. However, it is a little confusing that there are so many visits from Chile. And most of those were from a single city. Perhaps a university there was teaching a class that used some kind of reference to my site. The percent new visits is very low there; maybe something else is going on that caused a browser to always open to my site. Whatever the reason, I hope it was useful to them.

This report shows the frequency that people visit the site: FrequencyAndRecency2012-2013.pdf. Again, 70% are one time visits, so 30% are repeats. Those rates used run at 60% and 40%; perhaps people are finding it less useful than before. I suppose the IP address is used to determine each unique visitor. What is surprising is that there are some 'people' who visit over 50 times. Are these web crawlers refinding the same site again and again? Does someone's browser reopen all their bookmarks/favorite places every time the browser connects? If the latter, I'll take a small compliment that someone thinks the site is worth remembering. Otherwise, who knows what is going on.

And finally, here is a report that shows what search words were used to find this web site: Traffic2012-2013.pdf. Some of the entries like "forum.wrfforum.com / referral" indicate that within the WRF users forum, someone gave a link to my site and someone used that link to get here. Some of the words that seem to have gotten people to my site seems to be mistakes; the combinations of words seem to show interest in particular information but I know my site does not have much that would help. Just because people found my site does not mean they wanted too. I suppose these contribute to lowering the time spent on the individual pages and the site as a whole.