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TUMEKE Stats for August 2008

Tim Selwyn is reporting that the collation of site stats to create a NZ blogosphere ranking is taking him days. So I thought I'd start posting my stats to help him out. Although, I'm also thinking that either a program to generate these across the blogosphere, or a more quickly derived formula would be the way to go.

It took me a while to work out how the stats were derived, and it seems to me the Alexa stats are off (higher) compared to our Site Meter stats, by about 10-20% (from two months data).

The way I read it, Tim uses site stats when available, and Alexa estimates when not. Unless Alexa matches exactly with the site meters, then there will be an unfair disparity between scores, especially if the difference is 10 to 20%, as my small sample indicates. On the other hand, Tim sampled a dozen or more sites and found a much smaller difference. His graph is here: Tumeke Blog Traffic

Another wrinkle across meters is the way unique visits are measured. The unique count varies according to the period the unique count covers. Furthermore, if the counters are not on all pages of the templates, then those pages will not register page loads, and possibly visitors. Also, browsers with strong cookie control policies will also distort accurate visit counts.

I see that Tim spent a fair amount of time correlating the two sets of data with a small pool of examples; he could now add my stats to that pool and continue to check the variances.

I was curious also to see if Google Chrome has registered on our site. We've had 10 visits up to Friday last week - just a few days since its release. Firefox reigns supreme here, beating out Internet Explorer by at least 10% when summing all versions. Safari, Opera and others register but are dwarfed by IE and Firefox.

Personally, I've recently updated to Firefox 3.0.1 and remain a satisfied consumer.

So here's our stats for August. The number in brackets indicate the July months listed scores:

A. Visitors for August 2008: 7127 (8370)
B. Pageloads for August 2008: 10,066 (10,286)
C. Average Daily Unique Visits: 230 (270)
D. Alexa World Ranking: 588,662 (906,289)
E. Alexa NZ Ranking: 1011 (1003)
F. Technorati Authority: 57 (57)
G. Technorati Ranking: 120,017 (124,000)
H. Number of Posts in August: 48 (65)
I. Average Weekly Posts: 11 (15)
J. Average of Highest Weekly Comments: 32 (25)

TUMEKE SCORE (C)230 + (F)57 + (I)11 + (J)32 = 330 (367)

Ranking previous months: [15,22,21,19,18,16,22]
Scores Previous Months: [367,280,327,329,343,362,263]


Interestingly, Alexa seem to have put us at 588,662 worldwide, a huge drop from previous months. We were over a million a while ago, and our monthly average for unique visits is only around 10% higher than 3 months ago, so it doesn't take much to jump around the upper ratings area.

Our Technorati authority is at 57, up slightly and our rank at 120,017 up from 6 months ago when we sat around 52 and 180,000.

TUMEKE! ranked us at number 15 last month. We'll drop this month, possibly into the high 20's or early 30's if our (new) Sitemeter stats are used. We'd be in the top 20 again if Alexa rankings were used.

In any event, Tim Selwyn has undertaken a massive job and whatever the formula used, its an interesting exercise to see in one place, a list of 100 plus blogs discussing New Zealand life and politics. A great effort.

TUMEKE: NZ Blogosphere rankings

Comments

  1. I don't take any notice of his ranking. For a start it rewards link whoring. My alexa rating is all over the place. During one week it dropped from 945k odd to 5 million! It's come back up now, but the changes seem to be for no reason - as my traffic is pretty stable.

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