Last month, Horn Matters hit a new high for web site traffic and overall, our readership is trending upwards. With this in mind and looking ahead to the new year, now is a good time to look back and see what has been going on in terms of web site traffic at Horn Matters.
Overall trend: Jan. 1, 2011 - Dec. 5, 2011. Click for a larger view.
To accurately monitor web traffic to and from Horn Matters, several different statistical tools are used: Google Analytics, StatCounter and the built-in server stats provided by our hosting service. What follows are a few charts and graphs which illustrate the general trends based on the results from these tools.
Comparing 2011 to 2010
We begin by looking at the big picture – - comparing page loads (how many times a page is seen), unique visits (the actual number of visitors) and return visits for 2010 and for the first 11 months of 2011 (stats to date).
This chart indicates that our traffic has increased significantly – about 20% from 2010 to 2011. For the year 2011 alone, these numbers averaged out, per person to:
- 2.58 pages per visit
- Just over 3 minutes average time on site
Top countries of origin
Taking this statistical data and sorting it by country of origin produces the following results for the top 17 countries.
Roughly 80% of web traffic to Horn Matters generates from the USA and while this is nothing to scoff at, we hope this will change over time. We aspire to appeal to all walks of life in as many geographic regions as possible.
Browsers
One interesting trend to look at is the drop-off in use of the web browser Internet Explorer and the increase in use of Google Chrome.
In previous years IE dominated the rankings and Chrome barely registered as a blip on the radar. In 2011, IE has dropped from the #1 spot and is currently tied with Apple’s Safari browser. For web programmers and designers, IE is more-or-less reviled as a browser and speaking for myself, I am quite happy that fewer people are using it.
Looking at the top 7 browsers:
Frequency
Among our returning visitors, most check in on a daily or semi-daily basis.
Top 35 Items of Interest for 2011
Closing out this overview here are the Top 35 items of interest on the Horn Matters site for 2011, according to unique visits.
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One item in particular that stands out to me is #12 – for an article that was only posted a few days ago, this is (relatively speaking) viral in terms of its ranking for the whole year.
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Related articles:
- Who Reads Horn Matters? Spring 2011 Update
- Year One for Horn Matters!
- Web Site Updates Summer 2011
- Site Stats; Thanks to our Readers
- The Next Big Step for Horn Matters
- Anatomy of a Music Stand (Spring 2011)
- Update 2011: Why Write Articles and Put Them Online?