![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfI'm looking at logfiles again (while I'm eating, but I'll go back to work in a moment), and apparently my most 'popular' story, in terms of hits, is "Flaking Paint"/"Rock Bottom" (both are working titles), with 39 hits a month at rank 8 of all pages of my website. Incidentally that is also a story I got the last (make that only) feedback for (again, except for when posting bits of it on forums) in early 2000 or so (started writing in 1999). It is, in terms of accomplishment, very much one of my worse efforts - hey, it was my first attempt at fanfic! It is also not at the top of the list on my writing page, so it's unlikely people will click it first, I think. Oh, and it's unfinished.
So, why the many hits, I wonder? There are two possible explanations, I think. First the pessimistic one: for unfathomable reasons it *is* the first story that most people read, and they decide they don't like my writing based on that, and leave my page, hence the few hits for other stories.
The optimistic interpretation? Those 39 hits, or a few of them, are people who read the story (what there is of it), liked it, and keep checking back, occasionally, to see if it's been updated. Hmm.
Second most popular story according to hits is Together, with 23 hits a month. Followed by Sometimes We Believe (16 hits), Names (13), Endure and Rise and Shine (both 11), This is your Time (9) - damn, people are still reading that? I should take it down. *shudder* - Epilogue and Zusammen (8), and A River in Egypt (7).
Those are the stats for February, but they're more or less consistent, with some variation in the lower ranks, with those for January.
And, speaking of ego surfing... I just checked fanfiction.net for the first time in months, and the girl who thought Rise and Shine was a comedy put me on her author alert list. Wellllllll..... Actually, she may even be sort of confirmed in her misperception by the next part of that series (if I'm ever going to finish it), because the next one *is* meant to be a bit more comical. Which is why I seem to be unable to write it. Can't do comedy. (Unless, apparently, accidentally.)
So, why the many hits, I wonder? There are two possible explanations, I think. First the pessimistic one: for unfathomable reasons it *is* the first story that most people read, and they decide they don't like my writing based on that, and leave my page, hence the few hits for other stories.
The optimistic interpretation? Those 39 hits, or a few of them, are people who read the story (what there is of it), liked it, and keep checking back, occasionally, to see if it's been updated. Hmm.
Second most popular story according to hits is Together, with 23 hits a month. Followed by Sometimes We Believe (16 hits), Names (13), Endure and Rise and Shine (both 11), This is your Time (9) - damn, people are still reading that? I should take it down. *shudder* - Epilogue and Zusammen (8), and A River in Egypt (7).
Those are the stats for February, but they're more or less consistent, with some variation in the lower ranks, with those for January.
And, speaking of ego surfing... I just checked fanfiction.net for the first time in months, and the girl who thought Rise and Shine was a comedy put me on her author alert list. Wellllllll..... Actually, she may even be sort of confirmed in her misperception by the next part of that series (if I'm ever going to finish it), because the next one *is* meant to be a bit more comical. Which is why I seem to be unable to write it. Can't do comedy. (Unless, apparently, accidentally.)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-01 12:59 am (UTC)Checking the referers (not just for this story in particular, but for the whole allabouthmpf.com) could give you more insight. Check out the pages that refer to your domain. Does any of these pages mention this story in particular?
Or maybe the story is often referred to by Google or another search engine, because it contains certain keywords?
With some effort (or good log evaluation software) you can analyse the clickstream of the people who visited that story. Your logfiles should contain either IP address or the resolved name of the accessing computer. Because this identifies the particular visitor you can extract all the entries referring to him/her for that particular session (not across different days unfortunately as most people have dynamic IPs). If you sort those entries by time you can see where s/he entered your domain and what s/he looked at for how long on your page. That way you can for instance determine whether the same person has browsed your stories or if s/he steered with determination to that one story only. Looking at the referer will tell you where that person came from.
If the referer is empty and the person accessed the story directly (i.e. the first request of the session is already to the story) this is a good indication for your story being bookmarked by this person.
If on the other hand the person entered allabouthmpf through some general link to your site and visited several stories, s/he was apparently only browsing and by looking at the times of the different requests you may see that s/he looked at the story only for a few moments.
In general it is misleading to judge popularity by hits alone. Were a very popular site about writing fanfic to refer to your story with the words "Look at this crap and learn from it how NOT to write a story!" that could give your number of hits a great boost, too. Don't forget that UNpopularity is also a way to become famous :-)
That's not supposed to be a judgement of your story (I haven't read it), just a general remark that the number hits is not a good indicator for popularity.
Stats evaluation...
Date: 2004-03-01 05:54 am (UTC)I did, but there's no way for me to correlate them with the pages visited. In general, most of my visitors come via google and other search engines. My website is not 'famous' enough to be linked to by many people. According to the referrer analysis my provider offers I am on one HL fansite directory, on one or two FS links lists, on the Tolkien websites of one of my friends in that fandom, and recently on that Harry Potter recs page, and that's it. Nothing of that might explain the 'popularity' (as you can see from my 'pessimistic theory' above I am well aware of the two-edgedness of that expression when applied to hits alone) of that particular story.
>Check out the pages that refer to your domain. Does any of these pages mention this story in particular?
The only story of mine that has ever been recommended on a permanent recommendations page (or, for that matter, mentioned at all) is the one that I wrote about the day before yesterday. Before that, I've been recommended once on LJ (last year), and once on a mailing list, about four years ago. No one has ever recommended that story. And it gets nearly half of the total hits of my website! If they came from a particular website, that would have to show up in the stats, wouldn't it?
The only explanation I can imagine (besides people liking and bookmarking it) is that for some reason it is 'prominent' in google. But I don't really understand how that could happen.
>Or maybe the story is often referred to by Google or another search engine, because it contains certain keywords?
Hardly. It's not different, in terms of vocabulary, from the rest of my writing and website.
>With some effort (or good log evaluation software) you can analyse the clickstream of the people who visited that story. Your logfiles should contain either IP address or the resolved name of the accessing computer. Because this identifies the particular visitor you can extract all the entries referring to him/her for that particular session (not across different days unfortunately as most people have dynamic IPs). If you sort those entries by time you can see where s/he entered your domain and what s/he looked at for how long on your page. That way you can for instance determine whether the same person has browsed your stories or if s/he steered with determination to that one story only. Looking at the referer will tell you where that person came from.
Problem: I don't have a program for that kind of thing.
>In general it is misleading to judge popularity by hits alone. Were a very popular site about writing fanfic to refer to your story with the words "Look at this crap and learn from it how NOT to write a story!"
I know. But I don't think that even my first effort was bad enough to warrant that. And even that kind of site would appear on the list of referrers, wouldn't it? But there are no sites that refer to me at all that generate more than 5 hits for me per month. Except for google.
Re: Stats evaluation...
Date: 2004-03-01 04:00 pm (UTC)I don't, either. I simply read the raw logfiles.
> I did, but there's no way for me to correlate them with the pages
> visited.
If you read the raw log files, you can do that easily, because it's all on the same line.
> In general, most of my visitors come via google and other search
> engines.
Reading the raw log files will show you the actual search query that led to your site.
The moral of the story is: Read the raw log files. They may not be pretty, but the information they contain is worth it.
And if you need help, just send me a mail. I *love* log files. Must be some kind of technological voyeurism :-)
MSB