Site Traffic Reports
(Last update: August 13, 2011)
Technical Stuff for the Curious!
This site went "live" on October 6, 2009. It replaced a previous site that was relatively unknown except to a few people. Since that date, traffic has been steady with visits almost every day. The purchase of the building by Jim Lindner and the ongoing renovations had renewed interest and people apparently want to see what's happening!
The statistics reports indicate the number of "new" visitors within the reported time period only, the largest is one month. That means the new visitors in one month could be repeat visitors from a previous month. While it would be nice to know just how many "new" visitors there were overall, that information isn't available.
While there has been nothing new added since the fall of 2010, statistics indicate that interest in the site has not dropped off much at least until May.
Some interesting statistics:
2009
Oct. 7: 18 visits (the first day after going live!)
Oct 21: 25 visits
Nov 8: 47 visits
Nov 8-11: 95 visits over 4 days
Dec 13-14: 91 visits over 2 days
2010
Jan 22: 30 visits
Apr 15-18: 100 visits over 4 days
May 21-22: 51 visits over 2 days
Aug 13-16: 179 visits over 4 days
(Traffic on the 13th and 16th were at various times of day but there were odd spikes on the 14th
... 35 visits around 8 AM, and on the 15th ... 37 visits around the same time.)
Aug 31: 45 visits
August 2010 was the peak month ... 449 total visits for the month.
The Referring Sources report tells me that most visitors have bookmarked the site so obviously people are returning regularly to see what's new. Google search is second on the list. Those two are way ahead of other sources on the list. Some visitors come from links on my personal web site, we got a few now from a link on the Riverport community web site (www.riverport.org - see Events and Activities page), some came from Facebook. You know that once something is on the Internet, it spreads everywhere - there have even been a few visits originating from Google's sites in France, Hungary, Ghana, Lebanon and Kuwait!
The Keywords report tells me that many visitors are finding us through searches - most using Google. Some are searching on St. Mark's so are actually looking for our site. Many are searching on names of people who have been connected to St. Mark's. Interestingly 34 searches were on Luke Batdorf one of St. Mark's former ministers (it was top of the keywords list.) Other search terms seem to be totally unrelated so our site must be coming up in the search results and they just decide to have a look anyway. (For example, no one searching on "How to handle church overflow crowd on Sundays" would be looking for our site! We never had that problem.)
The home page and the "New Beginning" page are running in a close tie as the page most visitors are starting from . "Historical Pictures" comes in a close third, so some people must have bookmarked these pages and come back to check for updates. (I do note any new entries in the pink "What's New" box on the home page!)