May 15 More Statistics.

When I re-read the previous post from earlier today, I realized I had missed some of the major statistics I get from the AddFree Stats service.
Cards From Ogden Point has had the following numbers of visitors:
2004: 1023 Visitors Viewing 14874 Pages
2005: 9028 Visitors Viewing 100278 Pages
2006: 5605 Visitors Viewing 71287 Pages
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Total: 15656 Visitors Viewing 186439 Pages

May 1 to 15 2006 has had 629 visitors view 9790 pages.
Those included:
284 visits to the Preview Page
151 visits to the Card Sent Page
The difference indicates the number of times senders went back to edit cards after seeing them in the preview..
283 visits to the Card Pickup Page
The Pickup Page will count the recipient every time they visit the page to look at the Posty. It will also count the sender if they visit from the "Your Card Has Been Received" notice.
The bulk of those cards are likely Mother's Day Cards.

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In Contrast My PhotoServer has seen the following traffic despite its ease of viewing of all the pictures used in the Card Site (and more.)
2004: 209 Visitors Viewing 1136 Pages
2005: 450 Visitors Viewing 2177 Pages
2006: 455 Visitors Viewing 2067 Pages
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Total: 1114 Visitors Viewing 5380 Pages
...ron...

May 15 Statistics.

While deciding whether to leave the Card Master Top 50 Button & Link on my site I went through my site visitor statistics in some detail.
I have a variety of counting tools on my pages that count visitors to my site in various ways.

I described the Visitor Maps in some detail on a previous posting in this Blog so I won't repeat it here.

I use individual Site Meter counters like the one on the left side of this page to track visitors to specific areas in my sites. For instance there is a separate Site Meter for the Card Preview Page on Cards From Ogden Point. I can use that to tell me quickly how many visitors have gone to the preview stage of creating a Posty. That service uses cookies to track the visitors.

I have some counters from Extreme Tracking like the one on the Welcome Frame on Cards From Ogden Point. It uses a Java Script to record the visits without cookies. I use it to see if the visitor counts are different without cookies -- just to verify if I am losing visitors because of the cookies the other counters use. So far if I lose any visitors the count is not noticeable.

My primary counting device is AddFree Stats. It is a free service (as the others are) which allows different trackers for different pages within a site. I currently have 150 individual trackers on the various pages in Cards From Ogden Point. That may seem like a lot until you realize that there are 4109 individual pages in the main site and 101 in the backup site. The "trackers" count groups of pages because I have the same tracker on each page in various groups. For example, all the Mother's Day Index Pages share a tracker and all the Easter Index Pages share a tracker. So I can't tell which index page was viewed but I can tell if someone visited an Easter Index in a particular visit. The Slide Shows (Random Posty Pages) are all on index pages and they change pictures by refreshing the page. So if someone leaves the May 2005 Index Page open on their computer to watch the slide show, the 2006 pictures index tracker will increment its count every time the slide changes.

So what do I know about my visitors in 2006?
These stats are from the AddFree Stats Counters on Cards From Ogden Point for the first 135 days in 2006.

The Most commonly Viewed Pages:
The Valentine Indexes with 6589 views,
followed by the Main Index Page with 5565 views,
and the New/2006 Pictures Indexes with 4866 views.

The Most Common Entry page:
The Main Welcome Page with 1885 visitors entering there.
Next was the Card Pickup Page with 1443 people entering the site by picking up a card someone had sent them.

The Most common exit page:
The Card Pickup Page with 1187 visitors picking up a card and not staying on the site.
This is not something I want to happen LOL -- I'm trying to keep visitors. The number of people who stay at least long enough to send a Thank You Card has actually improved my visitor retention numbers -- before the "Thank You" links were added, even more people left immediately after picking up a card. The options of saving, printing, and emailing the card have added to the numbers of visitors who stay. With 1187 of 1443 people leaving, that is obviously a target audience I have to work on.

It would almost appear to me that there are three types of visitor -- those that come to browse the pictures, those that come to send a card, and those that receive cards. It would also appear that there is a distinct group of people who send cards, and that the people who they send cards to either don't reply or don't send cards (at least not from Cards From Ogden Point).

The visitors referred by search engines are growing.
The first 135 days of 2006 showed 576 Search Engine Referrals
(an average of 4.3 per day):
Yahoo: 268
Other: 172
Google: 119
MSN: 6
Excite: 3
Netscape: 2
AddFreeStats 2
AOL 2
Dogpile 1
Lycos 1
("Other" would include the MyPostCards Network Search.)
The whole year 2005 showed 599 Search Engine referrals (1.64 per day):
Yahoo: 333
Google: 207
MSN: 24
Other: 16
Netscape: 7
AOL: 7
Lycos: 2
Dogpile: 1
Webcrawler 1
Altavista: 1

231 of the 576 Search Engine Referrals in 2006 were in May. That tells me my efforts at Search Engine Optimization and the process of submitting Site Maps to Yahoo and Google is working.

There are 64 countries represented in the 2006 totals, and visitors used browsers with 9 languages other than English.

The majority of visitors in 2006 Use Windows XP:
Win XP: 4343 (79.59%)
Win 98: 488
Win 2000: 243
Unknown: 216
MacOS: 125
Win NT: 24
Linux: 10
Win ME: 7
Win 95: 1

The majority of visitors in 2006 use Internet Explorer:
MSIE: 4751 (87.06%)
Mozilla: (Firefox) 510
Netscape: 160
Unknown: 26
Opera: 9
KDE: 1
I build the site using Microsoft Office Front Page and check it for Browser compatibility in both Internet Explorer and Netscape while editing the pages.
I view the pages in other browsers on other Windows and Mac computers and correct any viewing discrepancies that occur in the various combinations. Strangely one of the most difficult browsers to satisfy is Internet Explorer on my Mac Computer. Things that show up and work in Safari, Netscape, or Firefox on the Mini Mac some times don't show up in Internet Explorer on the Mac despite being optimized for IE on Windows. Anything using Sun Java just hums on the Mac even if it drags on a Windows Machine, and Active-X does not run in any form on the Mac, even IE. The only pages that poses problems on Cards From Ogden Point is the Slide Shows with Music. My webcams on the PhotoServer have alternate pages for Java and Active-X so they can be viewed from either system.

The majority of visitors in 2006 use screen resolutions of 1024 X 768, followed by 800 X 600:
1024x768: 192 (48.00%)
800x600: 111
1280x1024: 25
1152x864: 9
640x480: 3
1600x1200: 1
1400x1050: 1
Unknown: 58
My Posty Pictures in Cards From Ogden Point are for the most part 640 X 480 pixels. That means that for the 3 viewers using the old VGA standard of a 640 X480 Browser Window, the cards and pictures will not quite fit in the browser window. I optimize the pages themselves for 800 X 600 viewing and check them in 640 X 480 so they will load and show properly in 99% of the viewers browsers and with minimal scrolling in the other 1%.

May 15 Site Revisions

Mother's Day has come and gone with a reasonably good visitor count on my statistic counters.
There were a few less visitors than last year in the 8 days from Sunday to Sunday ending with Mother's Day. This year's visitors viewed more pages -- in fact more than twice as many.
2005 visitors: 496 page views: 3534
2006 visitors: 456 page views: 7116

The Mother's Day card pages in 2005 were the first pages that included any kind of slide show of the pictures available. They included a random rotating selection of some of the cards available in the Mother's Day group -- not all the cards -- just some of them. Since that time as I developed the site I have made every photo card available from the slide shows that run on the index pages in each card category and from slide shows and "Rotating Q's" that are linked from the various pages in the site. The experience in Mother's Day 2005 had indicated an interest in that type of presentation and the counters a year later show that more cards are sent by clicking the pictures in the "Random Posty Slide Shows" than by searching through the index pages to use the thumbnail pictures.
The counters also show that there are a lot more people who visit the site to browse through the slide shows than there are people who visit to send a Posty. I created the site to share the beauty I have seen through my camera viewfinder so those guests that view several hundred pictures in a sitting are equally as gratifying as the ones who come to send one special picture to someone they care about.
The attention the site gets has grown steadily through its life. The addition of the slide show feature added to the average number of pages viewed by each visitor -- by almost double.

The idea of adding Posties -- or some form of E-card to a site to attract new and returning visitors to a web site has been successful in my case. My PhotoServer has all of the pictures that are on the Cards From Ogden Point site available in various formats -- many of which are easier to navigate and quicker to load than the cards. For example click here for My Recent Pictures Album. The PhotoServer gets 2 to 3 visitors per day, Cards From Ogden Point has averaged over 40 visitors per day in 2006. The 2 sites are optimized the same way and submitted to the same search engines in the same way. They have been submitted to all the same listing services in the same manner. They are in the same physical place and in the same "cyberspace" on the internet. In fact Cards From Ogden Point is actually "inside" the PhotoServer navigation wise.

Cards From Ogden Point is listed in only one place -- The MyPostCards.com Network -- that the PhotoServer is not listed. That service is responsible for directing a large percentage of the higher traffic volume to Cards From Ogden Point -- either from the contests running on the http://champs.posty.com/contests or from the searches for cards from visitors to the network's search page. I pay to use the card sending and receiving service from the network, and the network provides that service and traffic to my site.

For 6 weeks ending today Cards From Ogden Point was also listed in the Card Master Top 50. That service is free and it bills itself as a service that will refer visitors to your card site. In April and the first 15 days of May 2006 it referred a grand total of 3 visitors to my site. I guess I got what I wasn't paying for. I removed the badge and the links from my pages today.