The previous 24-hour period (my SiteMeter seems to track hits from 1PM to 1PM every day, despite my having set it to the Korean time zone) saw me receive almost three thousand unique visits. Since these visits aren't resulting in anything new, like a pile of comments from strangers, I'm beginning to think it may be best to call these hits "phantom visits," because they're that insubstantial.
The initial faux-excitement at receiving an inordinate number of visits has disappeared; I'm just waiting for this anomaly to blow itself out. That might not happen just yet, though: barely two hours after the previous 24-hour period ended, I've got almost a thousand phantom visits. If anything, this indicates a pattern of acceleration, not decline.
I can almost hear the acceleration in my head. It sounds like a jet engine being cranked higher and higher, and eventually, something's going to explode.
_
Might be the perfect time to sign up for Google ads...
ReplyDeleteKevin,
ReplyDeleteAre you distinguishing between "visits" and "page views"? I am also seeing a surge in page views per individual visit -- getting roughly 2 orders of magnitude more page views than individual visits.
I think sitemeter has introduced a bug in their page-view counting.
John,
ReplyDeleteGood idea.
Henry,
I'm being careful to use SiteMeter's terminology: SiteMeter distinguishes "unique visits" from "page views" in its own idiosyncratic way. Example: some sites register an uptick in site visits if all you do is hit the "refresh" button. SiteMeter doesn't do this. A single unique visit, according to SiteMeter, is when a person arrives at your site. If that person flips around among pages at the site, then each act of "flipping" is considered a page view, such that your site might receive one unique visit but several page views from a single visitor. A further wrinkle: if a person should visit your site, then leave, then come back within 30 minutes, that second visit will simply register as another page view—as if the visitor had never left. If, however, the person leaves, then comes back after 30 minutes, that second visit is counted by SiteMeter as a second unique visit. It's an arbitrary distinction, but in my opinion reasonable.
So to answer your question: yes, I've been referring to "unique visits," per SiteMeter's lingo, since that's the more conservative count. My page views tend to be about sextuple the number of unique visits.
More information here.
ReplyDeleteKevin,
ReplyDeleteAll I can tell you is that I have never before seen any of my visitors registering more that 100 pageviews. My average has been around 2-3 pages; now suddenly it's 40 times as many. Something weird is going on with sitementer ...
The same thing happened in my blog - page views exploded. Because I'm paranoid I just deleted the sitemeter counter from my blog template.
ReplyDelete/Dunyazade
Sitemeter tends to be slow in responding to suspicious behavior. It's as if they were understaffed, or maybe too arrogant to test their software updates.
ReplyDelete