Cephalopodcast - The Ocean Podcast

This is my third entry in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger. Today’s topic is about traffic analysis: figuring out who’s visiting, where they’re coming from and how long they’re staying.

You may not know this, but as you route around the Interwebs, you leave a glistening trail of data behind. You produce this information mucus anytime you make contact with the Internet and it acts to both reduce friction and provide propulsion as you move from page to page. But this also means that just like some predatory flatworm, I can follow your spoor whenever you enter my domain. Lucky for both of us, I don’t do much with the data you secrete. And really there is no easy way for me to single anyone out for identification. I just see the aggregated image of all the visitors squiggling around the sidewalks of my site. With this, I can tell how folks find their way here and when they leave. I can also see where the trail dead ends (404) or is blocked (403).

To see these trails, I use a couple of different tools. In the beginning, I would just download the daily visitor logs as a spreadsheet and try to parse the tables out manually. After a couple thousand rows it would get tedious. Not that there is really that much traffic. It is just that every thing you touch gets tagged, every graphic, file and page and that adds up quickly. Fortunately my hosting company offers two options for parsing Web statistics easily, Webalizer or AWStats. Webalizer is the default and the one that I use. Because of this I can show you what it looks like when PZ Myers touches me.

That big spike on 10/8/2008 is for International Cephalopod Appreciation Day. It’s a fun tradition and many people contribute to the bump, but Myers always ends up being the biggest skew. Webalizer also gives me monthly, daily and hourly statistics, as well as top URLs by hit and by Kilobytes and top entry and exit pages. Because of it, I also learned that oddly enough snapping turtle is one of the most frequent terms searched for on this site.

I have Google Analytics running too. Fun fact: the original company that developed Google’s analytic software was called Urchin Software Corporation and you can see their invertebrate mascot in this picture. Google usually gives a more nuanced and attractive image of my traffic than Webalizer. With it I can easily parse out the perennial popularity of my PowerBook/Macbook power adapter wrapping tutorial.

And because of all these traffic tools, I can easily see so many of you worming your way into my heart. Thanks for stopping by and please pick up a cookie while you are here.