Fun, Geeky Web Statistics

Hey, it's the beginning of a new month which means I can look at the web statistics generated by webalizer for the department web sites and see how November 2010 went. Since we switched to using the main Arts & Sciences web server for our front end site, we have seen traffic on our departmental server drop by about half, from about 12,000 hits per day in fall 2009 to about 6,000 hits per day now. Now that the boring "administrative" type pages are all served by the centralized and standardized college server, all the content we are serving are the specific lab, personal and class pages created by the faculty, students and staff in our department. One thing I wanted to compare was how the browser has changed from November 2009 for both our departmental server, and for the meteorites site. From November 2009 to November 2010 the number of hits for the meteorites site has actually increased by about 50% from about 22,000 hits per day to about 33,000 hits per day. A lot of our hits there are by common folks who find some weird rock in their yard who think it might be a meteorite worth thousands of dollars. So they google terms like "lunar meteorites", "missouri meteorites" or "selling meteorites" and they find our site. Perhaps in this bad economy there are more people trying to make extra money selling meteorites!



So first I checked out the departmental hits which now no longer include all the hits diverted for undergraduate and graduate programs,  course lists, student directories, resource listings or other such boring pages. Here are my lovely statistics:

Site	Dept	%	Dept	%	Meteorites	%	Meteorites
Year	2009		2010		2009		2010
All MSIE	114,664	47.22%	59,710	39.94%	378,346	63.29%	537,760	58.79%
MSIE 8	37,482	15.44%	28,599	19.13%	149,991	25.09%	362,707	39.66%
MSIE 7	44,273	18.23%	16,104	10.77%	153,511	25.68%	129,314	14.14%
MSIE 6	31,379	12.92%	12,560	8.40%	87,919	14.71%	60,387	6.60%
Firefox	83,617	34.44%	44,532	29.79%	155,729	26.05%	195,075	21.33%
Safari	29,482	12.14%	26,980	18.05%	42,614	7.13%	118,505	12.96%
Chrome	9,267	3.82%	14,961	10.01%	16,790	2.81%	54,300	5.94%
Opera	5,776	2.38%	3,299	2.21%	4,364	0.73%	9,015	0.99%
Totals	242,806		149,482		597,843		914,655

As expected the Internet Explorer numbers have gone down for both sites percentage wise, but it remains the dominant browser. However, on our departmental site the total IE use is now under 40% of all visitors whereas it still controls almost 60% of the traffic on the meteorites site, with 2/3 of them running IE 8 (less than half the IE users on the departmental site are running version 8). The Firefox usage on both sites has also gone down on a percentage basis with the big gainers being Safari and Chrome. In fact, Safari and Chrome now account for over 25% of the traffic on our departmental site, about the same at the Firefox usage. I am also astounded as to how many people are still using Internet Explorer 6 despite its major security flaws. Over 8% of the departmental visits and nearly 7% of the meteorite users still use it. On the meteorites site we had more visitors using IE 6 than Google Chrome! I could analyze these numbers forever...