I ran a traffic analysis today and must say, I like the results. Stats are for the dates of 07/14/07 19:40:19 through 10/16/07 17:09:55. All stats have had internal addresses (hits from me) filtered out, so this is pure external data.

General

Total Hits: 103,697
Avg Hits/Day: 987
Avg Hits/IP: 3.87
Total Page Views: 29,656
Avg Views/Day: 282
Avg Views/IP: 1.11

Total Sessions: 26,817
Avg Sessions/Day: 255
Total Unique IPs: 9,755
Bandwidth Transferred: 4.56 GB
Avg Bandwidth/Day: 44.47 MB
Avg Bandwidth/Hit: 46.11 KB

I dunno what I did around September 15th that got me so many hits, but I gotta go look and do more of it.

Daily Hits Graph:

Referrers & Searches

 http://channel9.msdn.com: 17,654 Hits
Google: 4,361 Hits
Wikipedia: 1134 Hits
… And a bunch of places that sent 500 or fewer, which aren’t significant enough for a listing here.

Channel9 sends so many because that’s a forum I go to frequently and every post of mine has a link to the blog. Additionally, when I post images, they’re hosted here and thus count as hits. Channel9 has a slightly higher PageRank than I do, and much more traffic. So their hits really spike the graphs.

Google has been sending me alot of hits. I attribute this to my abundance of GoogleJuice, PageRank of 5, and awesome background code manipulation.

Top Referring URLs:
 http://channel9.msdn.com/rss.aspx: 2,795 Hits
Wikipedia’s Multi-Monitor Page: 391 Hits
Wikipedia’s George Foreman Grill wiki page: 347 Hits
Live Search: 150 Hits
Wikipedia’s Comcast wiki page: 118 Hits

… and lots more; I excluded specific forum post pages.

Daily Search Engines:
I don’t know what MSN and Yahoo are doing, but Google clearly has an interest in me:

Top Search Phrases:
Widescreen Wallpaper: 22 Hits
Comcast: 19 Hits
Weapons of Ass Destruction: 18 Hits
C: 16 Hits
Multimon: 8 Hits
Alicia Silverstone: 8 Hits
Lord of Sealand: 6 Hits
Car Repair Estimate: 4 Hits

Okay, there’s really alot more than that, but those are my top results. My proprietary in-house SQL logging tool I wrote reports 1112 total searches performed which resulted in someone linking here in this timeframe.

User Profile

Browsers:
Internet Explorer: 52% (34.22% MSIE7; 17.78% MSIE6)
Firefox: 19.54%
Netscape: 0.55%
Others: 27.91%

OS:
Windows XP: 49.35%
Windows Vista: 17.8%
Windows Server 2003: 3.56%
Windows 2000: 3.36%
Linux Hippies: 2.09%
Windows NT: 0.74%
Windows 98: 0.35%
Windows ME: 0.16%
Windows CE: 0.08%
Sun OS: 0.03%

I included FreeBSD within “Linux Hippies” because FreeBSD is a Linux Distro. So is Ubuntu. If you disagree, why are you on a Windows developer’s blog anyway?

Spiders:
1. GoogleBot (9,614 Hits)
2. MSN Robot (8,926 Hits)
3. Yahoo Slurp (4,713 Hits)
4. Alexa Robot (557 Hits)
5. Google AdSense Robot (222 Hits)

Google spiders me 3-6 times a day. MSN spiders me twice a day. Yahoo spiders me eight days a week, except the third Thursday of every other month during a full moon conciding with a planar eclipse on a Winter Solstice.

Errors

I’m seeing 5,376 Code 500 errors (”Internal Server Error”) being the most popular error on the site. If you experience one, please E-mail me and let me know what you were doing at the time so I can fix it.

There are 3,459 Code 404 Errors (”File Not Found”). I can safely blame this on the fact that migrating to the MV3 engine killed a slew of old links. I wonder what my traffic would look like today if I had taken proper precuations and implemented redirection logic.

I also see 331 Code 401 Errors (”Unauthorized”), and 67 Code 403 Errors (”Forbidden”). What are you people doing?

Data Mining Results

Here’s some random tidbits I got from my own personal backdoor software. I wrote this code to log everything that occurs on the site, on the IP level. Each of you has a unique UserID in my MS-SQL 2005 Database.

Since I implemented my per-hit IP logging:
25393 Activities logged:
- 16836 Spiders (Google)
- 2036 local (Me and roommates)
- 6531 Real People (You)

1113 Total Search Queries have caused Users to click a link from a Search Engine and come here. 1083 of them came through Google (Which is why I optimize for Google).

Top Searches:
19 Hits: error occurred during teh attempt to contact the domain controller rpc server is unavailable
17 Hits: Widescreen wallpaper
7 Hits: Ass destruction

The Ass Destruction thing (”Weapons of Ass Destruction”) was a reference I made to a Scott Adams’ Blog, the creator of Dilbert.

Top User Groupings (by Hits)

#1: GoogleBot (8468 Hits, 29 bots)
#2: MSN Live (4999 Hits, 133 bots)
#3: static.reverse.ltdomains.com (315 Hits, who are these 9 people?)

Well, I’ll can the rest in the interest of your privacy. Suffice it to say I know who you are

Random Info

As of this writing, the last person who came to the site was referred from Technorati.com three minutes ago. Might have something to do with my previous entry and the fact that every time I save a post, my blog pings Technorati automatically. Writing my own blogging engine has come in handy so many times

Sometimes I edit Wikipedia articles to link to relevant content as I create it. This strategy has resulted in 13 incoming links today. The users who came in this way were reading these Wikipedia articles: Multi-Monitor, Comcast, Geek Humor, and Anti-Lock Brakes.

I track all this information and more. I keep one window open to my SQL Serve to monitor these statistics in realtime:
- Top 20 Search Queries
- 20 Most Recent Search Queries
- 50 Most Recent Visits from users who were referred; and who sent them. This statistic strips out searches.
- 50 Most Recent Visits from users who did not have a referrer in their Request Header.

I honestly don’t know why I find this information fascinating. Perhaps it feeds my geeky God complex.