tianjara.net | Andrew Harvey's Blog

So I have a site over at http://andrew.harvey4.googlepages.com/ which I used to deliver my HSC notes to the public. Some time after I put it up I added Google's Analytics bug to the page to track the number of visitors. Almost two years on from that I can now present the results of the experiment. I have found no reason to hide this data and its not a business here so I have nothing to hide. The site (which is really just one page) got (over the period 17 Feb 2008 to 21 Nov 2009) 9,614 visits, 12,918 pageviews and 6,605 visitors according to Google Analytics.

[caption id="attachment_944" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Visits (not pageviews) for 2009 and 2008 in comparison."][/caption]

The most notable thing is that you see a spike on the day before the physics HSC exam (and then drops off as expected), there is also a gradual increase from Jul till whenever the exams are on.

As for traffic sources well search took time to increase and certainly has. In the beginning you wouldn't find my site in the top 10 results of common queries but now I'm getting traffic from queries (and these are the top 5, but only make up 45% of all queries) like "andrew harvey", "andrew harvey hsc", "andrew harvey physics notes", "andrew harvey chemisty", and "andrew harvey physics". The main traffic sources are 40% referer from community.boredofstudies.org, 30% direct, and 23% from Google. All referring sites actually made up 47% which was made up of this blog, various webmail services, various high school web sites, facebook.com...

[caption id="attachment_945" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="(From top to bottom) Direct, Referring and Search Engine Traffic Sources."][/caption]

96% of visitors were listed as coming from Australian IPs.

Of course I don't think any of these numbers are 100% accurate, for instance because the analytics is coming from the JavaScript code and not from the web server I'm not sure if people who block Google's IP's, or JavaScript analytics code are counted. Nor am I sure about people who were referred to be my another site, but choose not to tell me this in their HTTP GET header.

Unfortunately because I don't run a site on a server I own (gosh I wish I could, but the cost is off putting), I don't know the numbers of the PDF file downloads.