I’ve just been digging through the statistics for the last couple of months here at The Standard on Google analytics looking back over the last 7 years (a lifetime in blogging terms). We did pretty well for a crew who are all volunteers doing this in our spare time, a server budget now less than $300 per month and where all of us have a pile of other work to do.
Remember these figures are from google analytics from Jan 1 2008 (we turned it on at the end of Jan). They are different from the numbers in Open Parachute in sessions because every analysis program measures them differently.
Our users (as analytics calls unique visitors) is up just a tad compared to the usual. You can see the spikes at the end of 2008 and November 2011 for the previous elections. It was a bit of a lift this time around.
To give an idea how much of a difference it was. Look at the 3 months around this election and last election. The election in 2011 was on 26th of November. This years election was on the 20th of September.
| 2011 | Users | 2014 | Users |
| Sept | 25,858 | July | 40,078 |
| Oct | 34,667 | Aug | 71,327 |
| Nov | 46,621 | Sept | 113,482 |
But as importantly to me we didn’t suffer significiant drops in the quality of time that people spent at the site despite the increased number of users. Our time per session didn’t drop much from its usual average 6 minutes per session (more on that later). So people were still reading our posts and comments as avidly as usual.
Our pages per session didn’t change markedly. Note that the pageview spikes in April/May 2011 and Aug/Sep/Oct 2012 were affected by a bug in the facebook async code that facebook eventually corrected. We’re still doing just over 3 pages per visit.
Our sessions have climbed.
And our % New sessions (ie new readers) has climbed quite a lot as you’d expect.
What did surprise me was that more people were coming back to read more compared to last election. You read the PDF by ” target=”_blank”>clicking here, or face the scrolling fun of an embed.
Wow! some of you really do spend a lot more time here than I do.
Anyway while the election might have gotten somewhat disappointing results and we have had a cousin blog from further left growing next to us at The Daily Blog, it looks like The Standard is in fine shape. Apart from the inevitable fatigue by authors post election. Even more from me I suspect as I started a new job at the end of July and shifted the primary server on to fibre at home at the start of August.
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