2007 Stats

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

I thought it might be interesting to look at a few of my statistics for 2007 regarding the website. I know nearly all of you won’t be interested but some might. I also want to take the time to thank all my referrers for sending me so much traffic. I doubt I send many visitors to other websites becasue I generally link to author’s sites and FileFront and Filecloud.

It’s not going to be anything too in depth, just a cursory glance.

The Basics

Anyway, let’s start with basics:

349,413 Visits
193,007 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,300,689 Pageviews
3.72 Pages/Visit
52.25% Bounce Rate
00:03:42 Avg. Time on Site
54.99% % New Visits

So, over 1,300,000 pages views is pretty good for a year. Nearly 200,00 different visitors is great, now all I need to do now is get 1 dollar from each one…… And the “New Visits” seem great, but we’ll look at that in a moment. Overall I’m happy and please don’t ask what the “Bounce Rate” is becasue I don’t know and I suspect it’s bad !

Visitor Loyalty

Onto visitor loyalty, here comes the bad news:

1 times - 192,178 - 55.00%
2 times - 29,468 - 8.43%
3 times - 13,646 - 3.91%
4 times - 8,692 - 2.49%
5 times - 6,385 - 1.83%
6 times - 4,999 - 1.43%
7 times - 4,132 - 1.18%
8 times - 3,503 - 1.00%
9-14 times - 13,981 - 4.00%
15-25 times - 13,830 - 3.96%
26-50 times - 16,068 - 4.60%
51-100 times - 15,635 - 4.47%
101-200 times - 13,085 - 3.74%
201+ times - 13,811 - 3.95%

So, the really bad new is that nearly 55% of visitors only came once. For me that is heart breaking becasue clearly they didn’t find the site interesting. However, they could simply have come here from a Google search and have been looking for something completely different. There’s no way of knowing with delving much deeper into the stats and I have neither the time, skill nor inclination for it.

Referring Sites

So, what about those referring sites I mentioned? Well, here are the top thirty, with the number of referrals next to the site:

city17.ru - 8220
tenfourmaps.telefragged.com - 5819
hl2mods.co.uk - 5160
en.wikipedia.org - 4674
mods.moddb.com - 4102
uoz.multiplayer.it - 4051
amphibian.myzen.co.uk - 3123
planetphillip.com - 2870
modifikace.cz - 2427
planetphillip.filecloud.com - 2423
hl2spain.com - 1690
planetwolfenstein.com - 1652
planetquake.gamespy.com - 1637
developer.valvesoftware.com - 1451
moddb.com - 1301
narics.net - 1220
forums.somethingawful.com - 890
hlspain.com - 857
qshockwave.planetduke.gamespy.com - 795
celephais.net - 787
hl-improvement.com - 640
combinedestiny.com - 634
forums.steampowered.com - 624
collective.valve-erc.com - 610
city.doomcenter.ru - 607
twhl.co.za - 553
stumbleupon.com - 544
halflifefusion.com - 537
interlopers.net - 524
games.moddb.com - 519

Thank you to all those sites. I used to get over a 1000 referrals a month from Wikipedia until they changed the way they list HL2 mods.

Content

Now to some content with a few surprise in store….

Listing the results may prove too difficult to read, so let me give you some highlights:

- More people visited the Half-Life category than the Half-Life 2 (50,690 to 44,540 - so around 10% difference).
- Coastline to Atmosphere received almost 25,000 visits. The closet other HL2 mod was Riot Act with 9,275!

So, a HUGE thank you to Leon for making CtA his home on PP!

Summary

2007 was a great year for PlanetPhillip and hopefully 2008 will be even better.

Thanks to Google Analytics for providing such a great system.

Lastly, if anybody is truly interested then you can download the pdf files of the above details whcih contain much more information than I have presented here.
PlanetPhillip 2007 pdf statistics

About this entry

Published:: 1st January 2008 at 5:50 pm

Category:: Phillip's Blog

Responses:: 7 Comments (add)

Splatzone 1st January 2008 at 18:05 1

Wow, I’m sorry that you didn’t get loads of return visitors. In my eyes this is the perfect FPS site.

Very interesting stats though!
Stef 1st January 2008 at 18:40 2

Great statistics this is really interesting has a base for 2008 i’m pretty sure you could also look for hits according visited theme you should keep an eyes on this regarding archive section for 2008, are people going there or not?

i’m also estonish to see that Quakis site is part of your top 30 with 795 hits

this just give me hope for SP map corner
darkstranger 1st January 2008 at 18:58 3

Splatzone Said:

Wow, I’m sorry that you didn’t get loads of return visitors. In my eyes this is the perfect FPS site.

Very interesting stats though!

Yeah me too
Ryan "quakis" Rouse 1st January 2008 at 20:14 4

Stef Said:

i’m also estonish to see that Quakis site is part of your top 30 with 795 hits

Which has been neglected for quite a while. I should really get back into regular updates again.
l1ddl3monkey 1st January 2008 at 21:03 5

I think I can offer you a bit more insight here Philip as I spent more than a few years poring over people’s web stats as part of my (now happily defunct) career in digital marketing.

Firstly: Your stats are actually very good for a site of this nature and the things you’ve been disheartened by are fairly commonplace for most websites.

Secondly: All sites of this nature have a “core” of die-hard posters/ readers who make up the main community. They will also usually be the same people who post the most because they aren’t just here to view, download or keep up with FPS news, they are here primarily to “interact” with like minded people.

“Bounce Rate” is marketing term that describes visitors who arrive at a page and don’t progress beyond it (i.e they stay on that page).

The average bounce rate is usually around 50%, mainly it’s because there are a LOT of people on the internet and they aren’t all going to like PP (utter insanity, I know ).

This would also be reflected in your visitor loyalty stats and the interesting figures there for me are the 26-50% and 51-100% bracket, which is .

This indicates that a lot of your users (4% is a high percentage of repeat visitors) are checking your site on a weekly/bi-weekly basis which fits in with the current analysis of most people’s browsing habits (yes believe it or not there are people who don’t spend all their spare time browsing websites - I don’t know any personally, but I am reliably informed it’s true).

So in summation: You’re doing very well and there’s nothing to get disheartened by! In fact you have the sort of page hit figures that would be of interest (serious interest) to banner advertisers - although I’d completely understand if you didn’t want to go down that route.
planetphillip 1st January 2008 at 22:09 6

Thanks for the expert insight. I’m fairly happy with the stats.

I’m aware of the formula about 95% of visitors never interact 3% will reply but never start and 2% will start discussions. Of course it’s different here because only I can start the discussion and the stats for my forum don’t bear comparison with the main site.

I would be willing to run one banner but don’t know where to start looking.

I was approached by a company who requested my stats, which I duly sent but never received a reply.

If you can suggest a place to start looking I would be grateful.

In the past I have avoided advertising but feel that if I can balance the ads with plenty of new, original content, then the cash raised can be used for coding and graphical improvements.

I’m very happy with the new design (Coming soon, I promise!)but know I need some new buttons etc.
L1ddl3monkey 9th January 2008 at 17:22 7

Sorry - been away for the New Year so I missed this!

Most people won’t object to or be put off by a single banner ad, but I have to be honest and say I’m not very up to date on where would be a good place to look.

Having said that I do know some people I can ask who are still in the business.

Where are you based and where is the site hosted geographically (use my private email address if you don’t want to have a public discussion about it!).