Interesting Site Statistics

I've been tracking my site statistics using Google Analytics and StatCounter for quite a while now, and I sat down tonight to really look at some of the data. It's quite interesting. Here are some fun facts about the traffic my site receives:

• Microsoft ain't doing so well. Internet Explorer browsers only make up half of my pageviews, which is quite a bit lower market share than I had been led to believe. The other half is made up of Firefox at around 40%, and Safari taking the lion's share of the remainder.
• Moreover, MSN search yields the merest pittance of page referrals compared to Google and Yahoo. MSN referred about 1% of pages that came in via search engines. Google referred 80%, and Yahoo about 18%. Also, MSN appears to be the least able to connect people with relevant content, because MSN yielded the lowest pages viewed per referral out of all the major search engines. (For example, AltaVista, which referred about the same number of visitors to my site, generated over five page views per visitor on average, while MSN generated barely over one. In other words, AltaVista connected me to people who were actually interested in my content, while MSN connected me with people who immediately left.)
• If browser hits are to be believed, Mac is gaining market share. According to the browser agents, at least 12% of my traffic is coming from Macs. Granted, Mac types may be more attracted to the creative stuff featured on my site, but none of the listed incoming traffic keywords have anything to do with OS platform stuff except for searches that either list my domain (people typing my URL) or looking for software (Magic Mirror for Mac).
• Only 20% of my traffic comes from search engines, which means that the remaining 80% of traffic comes from direct links - either people actively bookmarking my site or clicking on a link on a web page somewhere. In fact, 25% of my site visitors have no referring link, which I am guessing means bookmarked locations or referred to from other sources, like an email client.
• My "depth of visit" statistics are odd. The graph looks like your typical falloff chart with a lot of one-page visitors, less two-page visitors, even less three-page visitors, etc. But I get a spike at the end of the chart with a lot of visitors visiting 20+ pages. Now, that's probably the effect of the "long tail" talking, but I also get a spike around 9 pages, and another spike around 16 pages. Somewhere on my site, there's about nine pages of content of interest to a group of people somewhere, and another set of sixteen pages of interest to another group of people. My guess offhand is that my ImaginEERIEing site is the sixteen, and my Shockwave3D Developer's Guide is the nine. (My home haunt page has about 30 subpages, half of which is tours of previous years and the other half being how-to's, and my Shockwave3D site has eight subpages.) I think that means that when someone finds my site who is interested in the content I offer, they consume all of it, but maybe that's reading too much into the data.
• However, the above assumption is supported by the fact that almost 6% of my visitors spend more than an hour reading my site when they come. That's good - it means that trying to have a detailed, content-rich site is worth the effort, because people are reading it.
• Finally, I have a pretty international audience. Only 70% of my traffic comes from the U.S. That surprised me, since I have a lot of content that is not only solely available in English, but also concerns a largely American holiday: Halloween. Still, I get a lot of hits from Asia on my Shockwave3D stuff, and I get hits from Europe on my Arkham Investigations stuff. (This latter content actually includes some localized content, thanks to the efforts of some fellow Arkham Horror fans.)

Anyway, hope you found some of these statistics interesting. I think other people who have their own web sites should share stuff like this. Do you have any interesting tidbits in your server logs to share?