Quantcast Site Tracking

I found a new traffic counting web site yesterday called Quantcast. Just like Google Analytics which I already use, Quantcast tracks site visits. Quantcast had already been gathering information on interfacebus.com so I went ahead and signed up for the free service. They must have gathered the data from people that use the service, or purchased the information from other servers. But they did indicate that data on my site was an estimate of some total, because they don't really have complete access to the site visitors.

To gain full access I'm required to place a small piece of Java code on each of my pages that they can read [just like Google]. Well I'm not inclined to do that to 1,400 pages just yet, but I did add the code to my home page. Having the home page tracked will at least improve the data they have about the site. I should see improvement in their tracking data in a few days when they update my statistics, they call it ~ Quantification in Progress. I can always add the code to the top ten pages of the site to provide even more data. The attached graphic is what they show now ~ a small segment of the charts and tables of data.

Quantcast indicates; "... Quantcast helps web publishers of all sizes understand the composition of their audiences and attract higher advertising rates ..."

Webmaster Tools

I uploaded yet another sitemap to the server last night, than let Google [webmaster tools] know. Google indicates that 1445 URLs were submitted via the sitemap. About 15 new pages.....

The point of up-loading a site-map is to let Google and other search engines know that there are new pages to be indexed.

The new pages were really just larger pages that were reduced in size by breaking the page into two smaller pages. The hope is that the smaller pages will help reduce the number of keywords on a page so ads will better target the page. However, the reverse is that the smaller pages will have less key words so they may not show up high on the search engine list. That's the trade off between a large and small page ~ better ads, worse search engine ranking.

Not sure which is better, but if the 'reduced' pages were never showing up on page 1 of a search engine any way than smaller pages are better.... interfacebus.com
Graphic is Visits from Japan.

Visits increasing

This is the same graphic I posted a few days ago, updated. Visits for the week are all above 8,000 to the web site. The increase is coming to late in the month to help, but this should turn around the slide in hits over the last 4 months.

Current visits are at 94,558 for the month, 129,612 total visits, or 1,849,578 Hits... Year to date Unique Visits: 1,193,224

Bandwidth: 10 to 12GB per month.

Referrals

I just blogged about this the other week, again last night I checked, 21,000 page impressions with zero to no income.

I run Referral ads from a number of companies, 21,000 ad impressions and a larger number of clicks but they generate no income. Well so much for free advertising, I deleted them from four or five pages last night. At first I was adding them to the larger pages, as a banner or page filler, not any more. They will be deleted as I run across them.

Somebody must make money from running these Referral ads? The number above is from one company, taking into account the others and the ad impressions reach into the 100,000's.

The graphic shows visits/hits per day for September. The numbers are down a 100 or so a day. Any day lower than 8,000 is a bad day ~ most are below 8000, so it's a bad month..

Video Interfaces

Just how many different types of video interfaces are there, and which ones should reside on my gear? Of course there's VGA, or really SVGA, which still gets supplied with most monitors and computers. However I oped for DVI on the last video card I purchased.

HDMI came out last year and it's competitor DisplayPort came out this year. Of course there are others, but most interfaces are out-dated ~ as well as all the analog interfaces.

The pic is just another map showing visits by city from China....

Page Impressions

Hits to the web site are down a few hundred a day. It's not uncommon for visits to rise or fall 10,000 a month. From looking at the graph, hits are down for months now, and that's not good.

Of course fewer site visits means fewer page impressions. The chart shows page impression from Jan. 2006. As pages are optimized people will hit the new page rather than hit some other page on the site and click over to the correct page. So, as the site gets more and more topic specific I expect to see fewer page views, but I also would like to see more people hitting the web site. More visits translates into more page impressions, unfortunately I'm not seeing that.

There's a 3 month lag between a site up-date and when Google picks up the change.....

Once the graph drops to all black ~ that's the week ends. The dip in the middle of the chart ~ server went down.

Robot Visits

Out looking at Google sitemaps and I grab a picture of the spider visits to interfacebus from GoogleBot. Seems over the last few months the minimum number of pages spidered per day is on the increase. Not sure why more pages are being checked, but at least that means that Google has the most current version of my pages.

Here is the previous blog about Google Crawl Rate. That page shows the crawl rate from January to June 2007.

So far this month the robot using the most server bandwidth was Google Adsense, followed by Yahoo Slup, Voila, and MSNBot. GoogleBot was the eight down the list. Looks like the Voila robot is from France. A total of 76 different spiders have hit the site this month.

Low page hits

So I took a closer look at pages that are getting very few hits via Google Analytics. I did find a few pages that were generated but never developed. I added those pages that still need content to my to-do list, about 20 odd pages. I didn't add any additional contents to the 'blank' pages but I did try to up-grade the other pages, about 30 additional pages.

The attached graphic shows visits from India to interfacebus.com. The cool thing about these graphic reports is that you can mouse over the cities to get a name and the number of visits coming in from each city. Not that it matters but you can also tell the location of the industrial centers in a country.....

Why Blog

Here are some of the major reasons why I blog, spending time here instead of up-dating the web site. The attached graphic depicts visits per city for the United Kingdom [UK] from Jan 01 to Sep 11, 2007.


Top ten reasons to blog if you run a web site:

1. Increase the number of external pages pointing to your web site.
2. Generate pages that are search-able from Blogger.
3. Generate pages that are search-able from the Google Blog index.
4. Add content and topics that do not fit into the 'facts only' website.
5. Add web 2.0 content via the comments button in the blog.
6. Forum to discuss website topics [hits, SEO, site issues....]
7. Add graphics that have the site name embedded within the gif.
8. Increase the # of pic files that are search-able via Google image search.
9. Blogger allows RSS Feeds.
10. Space to highlight troubled pages ~ low hits, no page rank, new pages ......

The blog does not take any of my server space or server bandwidth, and its free.....

Added Some new pages

I ran GSiteCrawler again tonight to generate a new site map to account for a half dozen new pages that have been added over the last few weeks. Google reports 1418 URLs submitted in the sitemap. With 1,290 pages currently in the index, but only 1,000 in the main index.
AWSats reports 1,291 pages.
MSN Live Search reports 3,674 [ site:www.interfacebus.com]
The map is generated from Google Analytics for www.interfacebus.com.

Other than new pages; these are some of the worst performing pages;
FTTH: it's still a blank page
Water Alarm Manufacturers:
Display Acronyms:
Chassis Parts:
Environmental Alarm Manufacturers:
PCI-104 Board Manufacturers:

There are always pages that don't do well.

Interface Buses

I ran TouchGraph again, this time using the term 'interface buses'. Only two of the smaller clouds are sites other than interfacebus.com. That's 'Serial' and 'System Bus'......

So for a major term like interface buses, Google associates most of my pages to the term ~ that's a good thing.

Updated Visits Chart

It's been a few months since the posting of the unique visits graph. Aug had 133,516 unique visits, 193,004 total visits and 325,100 page views [according to AWStats].

It appears that the site has plateaued at about 135,000 unique visits, at least for the last year and half.

Google Adsense reports 293,172 page impressions, however 3% of people visiting the web site do not have Java enabled. This blog only gets 1,266 page impressions a month which is part of the Adsense data. Google Analytics reports 368,260 page views for Aug, with 3,086,130 pageviews, for the year.