Chartist Ancestors visitors top 40,000 in a year

Nearly 40,000 people have visited Chartist Ancestors over the past 12 months. Each visitor looked on average at just over two pages and spent around 2 minutes 20 seconds on the site before moving on elsewhere.

I know this because last July  I signed up to Google’s Analytics service. This works by providing a small line of code that website owners can add to their pages, in return for which they get access to Google data on how people arrived at the site, where they came from and what they looked at.

This is immensely useful because it gives me some idea of the sort of material that most people find interesting (allowing me to think about what else to add) and even provides information on technical aspects such as visitors’ screen resolutions (which I can use to optimise the design).

I should add that, although the information supplied by Google Analytics is astonishingly detailed, it does not allow me to identify any individual user. Whether or not your browsing secrets are safe with Google and your internet service provider I cannot say, but I certainly don’t know who you are.

Since I started using Google Analytics to track visitors in the third week of July 2007 (it took  few weeks to get the code on every page), Chartist Ancestors has received a total of:

·      *  37,629 visitors, who looked at
*  79,497 pages, or an average of
* 2.11 pages per visit, for an average
* 2 minutes 22 seconds per visit.

Seven out of ten visitors (69.73% to be exact) arrived at Chartist Ancestors from a set of search results. The great majority of these – some 22,417 out of 26,238 referrals – were from Google itself. One in five (19.97%) came from other sites. Of these 7,514 referrals, the largest number (1,663) came from Wikipedia. The remaining one in ten visitors (10.30%) arrived directly on the site, either typing the URL directly into their browser or following a bookmark added during a previous visit.

As you would expect, where people arrived on the site having discovered it during a web search, the most common terms used were “chartists” (1,289 visits), “chartism” (427), “chartist ancestors” (220) and “chartist” (202). 

Leaving aside the home page, the most popular destinations on the site were:

·      Chartism FAQs – 4,837 visits;
Chartist timeline – 1,841;
Newport Chartist rebellion – 1,760; and
Chartist land plan – 1,456

Around two-thirds of visitors were from the UK – 26,929 out of 37,629. However, there were fairly hefty visitor numbers from the United States (4,111), Australia (2,114), Canada (927) and even France (538) and Germany (394).

But numbers aren’t everything. My single visitor from Kyrgyzstan spent more than 20 minutes on the site.

Nearly eight out of ten visitors to Chartist Ancestors use (78.33%) use Internet Explorer as their browser, and of these three fifths have upgraded to Version 7. A further 16.97 per of people use Firefox while smaller numbers use Safari, Mozilla and Opera.

How Google records this I do not know, but some 93.89% of visitors were using Windows-based PCs, with 4.43% on Macs and 1.41% set up on the open source Linux operating system. There were even five visitors using Playstation 3s, and three or four on iPods, Nintendo Wiis, iPhones and PSPs.