Stats & Google Snax

I’m a stats obsessive, I’ll admit it. I check the stats on Cordite and this site every day. I keep weekly and monthly tallies. This week marks the end of the first year during which I’ve used WordPress stats for both of these sites, and the results are interesting. For me, anyway.

The Cordite site has garnered roughly ten times the number of hits as daveydreamnation.com, although it must be added that both sites have roughly the same number of posts (about 1200). The difference, of course, is that all 1200 of the posts on this site were written by me (although, quirkily, this is not denoted by the use of my name on each post), while the production of the Cordite site has of course involved the work of perhaps 500 or more poets.

Therefore the search strings for Cordite differ remarkably from the search strings for daveydreamnation.com. The single biggest group of readers who reach Cordite by means of a search engine have plugged in ‘cordite’ or a similar term. On this site, the opposite is true: no one search term dominates any other. People reach the site by plugging in terms or phrases, many of them used on this site in a different context.

The top number of hits for one day on Cordite (as validated by WordPress) was approximately 1500, on the occasion of the release of Cordite 29: Pastoral, last December. By contrast, daveydreamnation.com has achieved far less; and the two top days in terms of hits in recent times have both been in the 700s. The fact that these surge days happen so infrequently (when the daily average is between 30 and 70 hits), makes me wonder about where these ‘visitors’ are actually coming from.

Here’s a list of the top search terms plugged into search engines which led visitors to this site one day recently when daveydreamnation.com somehow attracted almost 1,000 hits:

I’m not sure what to say in response to this, except that I’d be more than willing to hear from most of these visitors – I’d love to know why ‘yoda and his army’ is so important to you, and indeed, I’d love to find out which page on my site contains reference to such an army. Rants on why punk rock sucks are always welcome, and I hope that I’ve been able to provide for at least one person an example or two from the genre. As for whoever typed in ‘lushes nipples’, I know who you are. BC me. Oh, and in answer to that last question – yes. Of course they can.