Occam's Razor

January 1^st means I spend some time pondering my usage statistics for the last year. I spent some time on this last month when the blog officially turned ten years old. I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. Measured by direct web traffic, 2012 sucked. Measuring subscriber usage and social media usage shows a different story. Unless noted otherwise, my reference is Google Analytics.

Overall 2012 Statistics

• Total Visits: 26,766 (72.8 per day), down 45.2% compared with 2011
• Total Page Views: 34,704 (94.8 per day), down 61.5% compared with 2011
• Percent of New Visits: 87.96% (89.13% in 2011)

Overall, web traffic is obviously down substantially, roughly in half since 2011. There are lots of reasons for this, but the most likely reason is that I am posting less often. This likely makes this site less interesting to search engines. Overall there were 107 posts in 2012 versus 127 in 2011. There are likely other reasons. My posts are less topical, as topical posts are likely to get more hits. Remember that these statistics measure traffic principally driven from search engines. Content on other sites is considered more interesting. I also strongly suspect that Google keeps refining their algorithms for measuring legitimate traffic too, and this is reflected in lower statistics. This blog is affected by a general trend where search traffic is diminishing but syndication and social media usage is increasing.

Most Viewed Posts

1. Eulogy for my mother (18,980 page views) (#1 three years in a row)
2. Blog home page (8,631 page views) (#2 three years in a row)
3. Danger: Wal-Mart Customer! (5,870 page views) (#8 in 2011)
4. Craigslist Casual Encounters: Now officially a complete waste of time (5,459 page views) (#4 two years in a row)
5. The Root of Human Conflict: Emotion vs. Reason (4,764 page views) (#5 two years in a row)
6. You Porn: A Traveler’s New Best Friend (4,056 page views) (Was #3 in 2011)
7. Sharon Mitchell: Porn Saint (3,524 page views) (#6 in 2011)
8. Queer as a Three Dollar Bill (3,139 page views) (#7 in 2011)
9. The Illusion of Time (3,078 page views) (#9 two years in a row)
10. The Id unleashed at Craigslist Casual Encounters (1,642 page views) (#10 two years in a row)

The list of top popular content proves to be remarkably stable from year to year, continuing to mirror human nature: interests in death, sex and weirdness seem to be themes that interest casual browsers. The one exception is my essay on emotion vs. reason, originally written in 1997, which has some sort of bizarre staying power.

Top Tags

1. Civil War (373 page views)
2. Obesity (170 page views)
3. W&OD Trail (164 page views)
4. Battle of Chantilly (136 page views)
5. Battle of Ox Hill (130 page views)

Top Category: Best of Occam’s Razor (187 page views)

Top Browsers:

1. Internet Explorer (27.46%, was 35.54% in 2011)
2. Chrome (25.08%, was 17.27% in 2011)
3. Firefox (22.00%, was 27.36% in 2011)
4. Safari (17.76%, was 15.13% in 2011)
5. Android Browser (4.27%)

Overall Chrome is gaining most of the browser usage. Safari is getting marginally more traffic. Both are gaining at the expense of IE and Firefox. Safari traffic likely is due to lots of iPhones and iPads out there. As Android-based smartphones and tablet computers begin to proliferate, their browsers are showing up.

Busiest month: March (3,954 visits)

Slowest month: June (1,461 visits)

Mobile visits in 2012: 3466 (vs. 3904 in 2011)

%Mobile Visits of Total Visits:  13% (vs. 8% in 2011)

So much for Google Analytics. Lots of you are reading this blog via various newsreaders and content syndication mechanisms. Here is where I can document real growth. Feedburner reports:

• 83 subscribers as of December 31, 2012 (vs. 66 on December 31, 2011, an increase of 20%)
• Average number of subscribers per day: 70.02 (vs. 63.23 in 2011)
• Average hits per day: 198.62 (vs. 196 in 2011)
• Average number of click-throughs per day: 10.40 (vs. 7.81 in 2011)

I started tracking social media usage in March. It’s a bit too early to infer any meaning from those numbers, except they are relatively modest overall.

I am also tracking the site’s web traffic on quantcast.com. I’ve only been tracking it for a month or so. Their expertise seems to be in matching web traffic with user demographics. It gives me insight into your characteristics as a group. In general I attract a younger but highly educated crowd: ages 18-34 with a disproportionate number of you having a graduate education. Statistics are available for your browsing.

More in 2014.

Once upon a time when you wanted to meter your site, SiteMeter was the only solution. I started metering my blog with SiteMeter around 2004 because that’s what all the cool blogs were doing. Not that my “impressions” (page views) were ever that impressive, at least according to SiteMeter. Their meter went up and down but generally I was somewhere between a hundred and two hundred page views a day.

As I documented elsewhere, their metrics were grossly inflated, as they caught obvious search engines, which are not human beings. Still, it was useful to get a general snapshot of blog traffic. One click got you an up to the minute report. Google Analytics makes you log in and by default you are always a day behind. Despite its shortcomings, SiteMeter is useful. It excels in useful reports that always just one click away.

Around six a.m. on September 24, SiteMeter stopped metering my blog. The reports still come up but they just show zero traffic. Of course, this blog’s web traffic had not stopped, as evidenced by the fact that you are reading this. Both Google Analytics and StatCounter showed the usual site traffic. I thought maybe my tracking code had expired, but when I was finally able to log in to the SiteMeter manager and review my tracking code I found that it had not changed. So then I figured maybe they just weren’t aware that they weren’t catching my blog’s statistics. So I sent them a support request. More than a week later, I still have heard nothing.

Granted, it is hard to give me much attention when I don’t pay them anything. Most of SiteMeter’s customers don’t pay them. This limits us webmasters to the last 100 page views or visits and overall statistics, but they still have plenty of opportunities to make money from me. Every time I go to check out a SiteMeter report I see no less that two ads, one on the top and one on the side, will appear. And I typically checked the site a half dozen or so times during the day.

Go to SiteMeter’s web site today and it suggests that no one is minding the store. Their latest announcement was in February 2009. Their newest widget is for Windows Vista. They will still take your money quickly enough, if you want to pay for their service. It’s not worth paying for when there are so many superior and free alternatives. Why pay for a service when they cannot be bothered to maintain the site or troubleshoot problems? I imagine they hired some hacks to put the whole thing in the Amazon cloud and just forgot about it. To the extent they pay attention to it, it is to collect Google Adsense revenue. It probably pays for plenty of margaritas at the bar close to their deck chair along a beach in the Bahamas.

Not that they have cut off all my metering with SiteMeter. I also use SiteMeter on two other domains, and they are continuing to run fine. Their statistics, of course, are bogus and inflated as well, but I can still look at SiteMeter reports for these domains. For more official statistics, I go into Google Analytics.

However, Google Analytics tells you far more than you need to know. It’s an amazing product, just overkill for all but the most diehard web statisticians. SiteMeter’s user interface is simple, usable and clean. What I really need to do is emulate their reports and tie it directly into Google Analytics. Being lazy, however, I just haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve searched around to see if someone has taken the time to build SiteMeter-like reports for Google Analytics. If they have, I can’t find them or they are afraid of a lawsuit from SiteMeter’s lawyers. However, if I roll my own, I figure they’ll never know. So when I find some free time for the project, I plan to do it. It looks straightforward if you can write some code to parse a XML file.

Like Craigslist Casual Encounters, it appears that tracking your site with SiteMeter is now simply a waste of your time. So I’ll be removing my tracking code. No reason that I should give them my business since they obviously don’t care about retaining it.

I usually start off the year with a set of blog statistics from the previous year. However, this year I was on a cruise ship on New Year’s Day, and in fact I was off the ‘Net for over a week. So it’s time to catch up with the state of the blog.

A quick note: I am considering ending the blog in December after completing ten full years of blogging. It may be a logical time to stop. Or not. I’ll need something to keep myself amused in retirement.

This year my Google Analytics web statistics are puzzling and probably misleading. As I mentioned in another blog post, in June Google seemed to have changed the algorithm for deciding what is a real page view. Page views dropped about in half toward late June. Anyhow, for what it’s worth:

Overall 2011 Statistics

• Total Visits: 48,815 visits (134 per day on average), which is down 4% compared with 2010.
• Total Page Views: 90,205 (average 247 per day) which down 6.8% compared with 2010. I expect 2012 to have a markedly lower number, as January thru June 2011 were likely inflated due to a bad algorithm.
• Percent New Visits: 89.13%, which is down 2.26% compared with 2010. This is good because it means slightly more of you are return visitors compared to 2010.

Most Viewed Posts

1. Eulogy for my mother (14,266 page views, up  31% from last year, #1 two years in a row)
2. Blog Home Page (6,479 page views, down 66% from last year,  but still #2 two years in a row)
3. You Porn: A Traveler’s New Best Friend? (3,763 page views, down 33% from 2010, but overall moved up from #4)
4. Craigslist Casual Encounters: now officially a complete waste of time (3,709 page views, down 2%, but moved up from #6)
5. The Root of Human Conflict: Emotion vs. Reason (3,422 page views, up 15%, moved from #7)
6. Sharon Mitchell: Porn Saint (3,204 page views)
7. Queer as a 3 dollar bill (3,125 page views)
8. Danger: Wal-Mart Customer! (NEW on the top 10 list, 2,835 page views)
9. The Illusion of Time (2,526 page views)
10. The Id Unleashed at Craigslist Casual Encounters (1,435 page views)

The drop in the number of page views in the top ten actually suggest a broadening of the content being read. This is good. More people are getting beyond the top ten and are reading more obscure posts than in the past.

I still find it strange that the really old posts still bring people in, but more recent posts overall have people yawning. I guess they are just not very interesting. I am glad my mother’s eulogy is obviously helping so many people struggling with the loss of their mother. But mostly, human nature is what it is and pornography and internet sex seems to be what they want to read the most here. And maybe bizarre stuff as well, given that Danger: Wal-Mart Customer! is new in the top 10 (it was written in 2009). It’s also nice that the blog’s home page still comes in at #2.

Top Tags:

1. Civil War
2. Obesity
3. W&OD Trail
4. Battle of Chantilly
5. Fashion

Top category: Best of Occam’s Razor

Top Browsers

• Internet Explorer: 35.54% (down from 41.6%)
• Firefox: 27.36% (down from 34.01%)
• Chrome: 17.27% (up from 10.32%)
• Safari: 15.13 (up from 11.41%)

So it appears that my users are slowly ditching IE and Firefox in favor of Google Chrome and Safari. My suspicion is Safari is so high because most mobile traffic was via iPhones, which run Safari.

Busiest Month: May (12,671 page views)
Slowest Month: December (3,703 page views)

Mobile statistics are new in Google Analytics.

Mobile Visits in 2011: 3,904
%Mobile Visits of Total Visits: 8%

This site is also accessible as a newsfeed, both RSS and Atom. Most of those reading the blog via a newsfeed do so via FeedBurner. Here are a few FeedBurner statistics for 2011:

• Subscribers as of 12/31/2011: 66 (up from 59 in 2010)
• Average number of subscribers per day: 63.23 (up from 54.13 in 2010)
• Average hits per day: 196 (159 in 2010)
• Average click-throughs per day: 7.81 (5.23 in 2010)

More of my readers continue to read the blog through a subscription, but growth is modest. It may make up for some of the decline in visits and page views.

More on January 1, 2013, I hope.

Like many site owners, I monitor my web traffic. And every year I rediscover what Disraeli discovered long ago. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. The problem with web statistics is it is often hard to discern who is lying and by how much.

Most of us site owners care principally about one thing: how many eyeballs are looking at our site. And the answer turns out to be: no one really knows for sure. If you collect statistics using a hosted package like Awstats, it will accurately tell you how many overall hits and page requests you received, but at best it will poorly discern which of these represent eyeballs on the other end, instead of search engine robots and crawlers.

Based on my research, not even the mighty Google really knows. Because Google has tons of resources to throw at the web statistics problem, I figured they should know best. But it turns out that even Google can be fooled. At least that’s what I have inferred because around June 28, 2011 the number of page views on my site per day dropped roughly in half and have stayed that way. The same was not true with SiteMeter and StatCounter, which were also tracking my site usage.

06-26-2011	307
06-27-2011	337
06-28-2011	164
06-29-2011	165
06-30-2011	155
07-01-2011	135
07-02-2011	116

Was I upset that fewer people than I thought were hitting my blog? Not really. I had been thinking for months that Google Analytics was overstating my page views since their numbers were higher than anyone else’s, including SiteMeter. Sure, a higher number is always more flattering than a lower number but the average person arriving by a search engine is not reading three pages on my site, which Google Analytics was suggesting. Get real. No, the average human comes to glance at some post it found via a search engine then quickly move on. Anyhow, as you can see, around June 28, 2011 Google Analytics started applying a new algorithm, filtering out about half the page requests it used to. What I suspect happened is that they realized they were counting as humans a whole mess of automated requests.

At least Google eventually realized their mistake. As I noted some time ago, SiteMeter simply does not care. For years it has included the Google search engine robot, among others search engines and robots among my visitors and page views. Yes, it’s technically true they visited, but clearly no human was looking at my site. I guess if the agent can fire off the embedded Javascript that pings SiteMeter, that’s good enough for SiteMeter. What’s clear is that SiteMeter has basically given up bothering to care. They were one of the first to market in this business, developed a huge market share, and now apparently is only interested in the revenue from selling ad space when you go to their site to check on your statistics.

To get an idea of what’s wrong with web statistics these days, let’s look at visits and page views for this last week. Which statistics provider would you trust? Google Analytics, SiteMeter or StatCounter?

Date	Visits			Page views
	Google	SiteMeter	StatCounter	Google	SiteMeter	StatCounter
10/5/11	143	149	161	174	209	188
10/6/11	125	152	153	143	195	176
10/7/11	105	130	116	124	211	139
10/8/11	80	113	97	100	150	114
10/9/11	104	131	111	119	227	135
10/10/11	149	183	175	179	259	209
10/11/11	116	164	146	123	298	159
Total	822	1022	959	962	1549	1120
Increase compared with Google Analytics		24%	17%		61%	16%

Granted, each may have different criteria for when a day begins and ends. The good news is that since Google now does a better job of filtering requests, it is now consistently showing the lowest number of visits and page requests, hence I am more likely to trust it. But since they made a major change to their count algorithm in June, it throws off all of their statistics for this site for 2011, which makes the overall statistics pretty useless.

SiteMeter obviously does not care, since you simply have to look at the visit details to see that many of them come from googlebot.com. It would be a simple matter to filter these out, but SiteMeter would rather sell ads than improve their filters. Overall, SiteMeter counts 24% more visits and 61% more page views than Google Analytics.

StatCounter appears to be doing a pretty good job. Its numbers are about 15-20% higher than Google Analytics, but at least it tracks proportionately with Google Analytics. Moreover, StatCounter clearly actively maintains its product, so it has some integrity. I have some sympathy for those in this business. It must be very confusing to provide any sort of reliable statistics because there is never any way of knowing for sure whether a human is at the other end or not. Then there are all sorts of “in the background” web hits enabled by Web 2.0 technologies, such as redrawing Google Maps. On the web anyone with the right technical knowledge can pretend to be a human. All a statistics service can really do is make reasonable inferences and continuously change their filters as new trends emerge.

Products like Google Analytics do a great job of slicing and dicing the data they decide to count. I particularly like some of the newer features, like the ability to see on a map those states and cities that are providing most of your hits, and statistics that show many mobile users you have and what kind of devices they are using. Given their inability to wholly discern human traffic from automated traffic, even those statistics are suspect. Still, they are one of the few providers capable of providing any statistics like this, and they do it for free. So even numbers that are probably somewhat off are still valuable.

The ultimate lesson for site owners: take your web statistics with a grain of salt. In particular, realize that SiteMeter is a tainted product, useless for meaningful statistics, and useful only for getting some idea of what pages were most recently viewed. In fact, you might as well get rid of your SiteMeter tracking code altogether.