Points of Articulation

Waldo

Visitor stats are the secret lifeblood of any website. It's how ad rates are calculated, and it's how we keep track of all of you folks out there who visit us but never bother to post on the message board or the blog. Yes, we know you're there. We wish you'd join in, but hey, it's enough to know that you're out there reading.

But part of being the secret lifeblood of a website is that it's a secret lifeblood. Nobody ever talks about them openly, and webmasters jealously guard their stats. It's a big secret about what your traffic is like, talked about in only the vaguest terms. But at the risk of perhaps embarrassing ourselves in front of everyone reading this, today we're pulling back the curtain and showing you everything.

Our hosting plan comes with a stat-tracking dealie, but it's hard to fine-tune or really drill down into the results, so a year ago we signed up for Google Analytics. Now, with a full 366 days of information under our digital belts, we can really see how we're doing.

• In the past year, 593,939 people have visited OAFEnet. That's unique individuals, not people who left and came back, so it's you and 593,938 of your closest friends.
• In that time, we've had 1,277,075 visits. A "visit" is any time one of those unique users comes to the site. If your uncle comes to your house, then goes outside and comes back in again, you don't say he visited you twice, do you? Of course not. So when you come to our site and read three or four pages, that only counts as one visit.
• "Three or four pages" is right. We've had 4,465,767 pageviews, which averages out to 3.5 pages per visit.

That's the Google Analytics version. How does it compare to our built-in tracker? Let's take a look (keeping in mind that it doesn't track individual visitors):

• 2,177,244 visits.
• 8,106,145 pageviews.
• 3.75 pages per visit.

Why is there such a disparity? Because Google doesn't track our message board, and the site software does. That's all I can figure. The page per visit ratio is almost the same, though, so it seems accurate.

So those are our stats. Hopefully we haven't shamed ourselves too much today. It's a bit unnerving to put ourselves out there like this; it's like getting naked in front of someone for the first time. So... be kind?