I subscribed to SiteMeter on the 4th of June and I find the statistics rather riveting. I especially get a kick out of looking at the location tracking graph by country. Yesterday’s graph, for instance, shows that the bulk of my visitors come from Malaysia (48%) and the United States (32%), with a few other visitors coming from as far away as Morocco, Algeria and France.
Of course, this graph changes from day to day and that just makes it even more fascinating.
Never mind if I’m only getting an average of around 20 visitors daily so far. My blog’s only 5 months old after all and as they say in Malay, “sikit-sikit, lama-lama, jadi bukit” (roughly translates to: little by little, over time, can become a mountain). And, for the record, a big THANK YOU to you, my readers, for regularly checking in.
If you want to see the site’s stats so far, just click on the SiteMeter icon on the upper right hand side of this page. Yup, that’s it — just under the Feedburner, Technorati and StumbleIt icons in the sidebar. The initial page will just give you a summary on the visits and page views. You have to click on the other options to see the maps and graphs.
In case you’re wondering what the difference is between visits and page views, Thinking Fish gives a clear explanation on the subject:
Visit – Someone comes to your web site and looks around a bit. They may go to one page, or they may go to 100 pages, but their (sic) still only visiting once.
View – How many pages were seen by that visit
Hit – How many physical resources were requested from the server by that visit. Pages are made up of many items (images, text, etc). Each of those is a hit, while a view is the page itself.
SiteMeter also gives me info on how people find my site. Some arrive through friends’ blogs, some via comments I made on other people’s sites or the Nikonians forum, still others through Google. Someone looking for “couple jacuzzi” ended up reading my review on Layalina Hotel, Phuket). A search for info on “Singapore Flight AK127 terminal” led them to my post on the KL-Singapore flight via AirAsia. Someone in France looking for a photo of Schengen visa found it in my post entitled Schengen Schmengen (Have Visa Will Travel 2).
I’m not paid for writing this but when I find something I like, I share it. So I say, go try SiteMeter today!
