9 September (Part 2) - Lies, damn lies and website statistics
I’ve often been asked how many hits the Bonkers site gets and I have tended
to dodge the question because I don’t regard the statistics as a very useful
measure. Welcome though they are to come and look, readers in Vietnam aren’t
going to worry Bexley council and there is not a lot of point in counting people
who arrive by mistake and leave two seconds later. Taking hits and visits at
face value is probably a fool’s game and to be honest I have little idea what
sort of figures a local website should be knocking up to be rated a success.
Publicly accessible websites that try to assess web usage via those annoying
tracking cookies that clog up your computer will tell you that Bonkers is about
the seven millionth most popular website in the world - which sounds pathetic -
and another will tell you Bonkers is getting about 30 hits a day; which I know
for a fact is wrong.
Councillor Colin Campbell revealed the figures,
with the same weaknesses that concern me, for the council’s website. I’m still not
inclined to give away much by way of site statistics, but by the measure that satisfies
Councillor Campbell, Bonkers is around twenty times smaller than www.bexley.gov.uk, perhaps
a little worse by some measures. (†) Maybe if I issued parking fines and collected the money
on-line things would be busier.
How people use the site can be fascinating. About half of visitors come in
thanks to a search engine search for ‘Bexley council’, the high Google ranking doesn’t do any harm. Close to
half jump straight into the blog suggesting they are regular visitors. These
people tend not to use the links to older blog entries on the same subject which
suggests they have read it all before, but they may be missing newly added documents.
The source of visitors can be interesting too. The biggest single group comes in
from ‘NTL Bromley’ which is Virgin Media’s local internet hub, so exactly what
you would expect. Over a period of time one could name drop almost everyone but
I shall confine myself to visitors this week (Monday to Thursday). Most of the
nearby local authorities and The Greater London Assembly have visited including
the two boroughs north of the river, and from as far away as Kensington. Nothing
from Bromley and nothing from Bexley of course, Tuckley’s Kim Jong-il style
censorship is working well.
The local media has dropped by quite often and two mid-range national tabloids have
nosed around quite extensively this week. The BBC too.
Council contractors can’t stop looking either, Serco, FM. Conway and the council’s
Thames Innovation Centre customers. All this week.
And welcome to the readers from central government and Parliament and
Conservative Central Office. Into double
figures of visits in the last four days.
† Comparing last April’s stats from the council with more recent ones from Bonkers.