Busiest & Slowest Days of the week

[admin]

I found this interesting, so I thought I'd share.
I pulled data for March 2011. Some days of the week occur 5 times and other days occur 4 times, so I averaged the numbers.
Interestingly, the busiest day of the week is Thursday and the slowest day is Tuesday. The 2nd slowest day is Wednesday, and the 3rd slowest day is Monday.
So, generally, the first half of the week is slower than the second half. Thursday, Friday, Saturday are the busiest days. However, I suspect that Saturday will start slowing down as the weather continues to get warmer.
Another thing worth noting is that all of the days aren't really that far off from each other. Overall, the traffic is actually pretty steady.
The difference between the busiest day and the slowest day is 12%.
Day Avg Traffic

Thursday 7,233

Friday 6,881

Saturday 6,879

Sunday 6,806

Monday 6,676

Wednesday 6,499

Tuesday 6,330

 

[admin]

That's unique average visitors, meaning for example that on Thursday 7,233 different people were on the site in total within that 24-hours, and each person was only counted once. So even if you came to the site 3 times throughout the day, you were only counted as one person.

 

[papipeguy]

If my hurried math is correct this site is running at a rate of about 2.5 million visitors a year. Pretty good for a niche business.

 

[schmitzbitz]

If you build it, they (er...we...) will come!
Seriously though Kevin, you, Bob, and the rest of the team deserve a big pat on the back; if it wasn't for the awesome content of the articles, blogs, and other points of interest on the parent site, most of us never would have discovered the forums in the first place, never mind returning daily...so kudos to all!

 

[admin]

That's about right PAPipeGuy. In March we had 200,000 unique visitors, and we are on track for about the same in April.
I'm extremely pleased with it.
For May we will have 19 advertisers total, which is a new record. The traffic level is a new record as well.

 

[bubbadreier]

Way to go!! I love this site and it is like seeing a family member grow and come into its own!

 

[lordnoble]

So I have a question Kevin... Unique is what? IP address, User name, etc.? I only ask because on any given weekday I use the site utilizing 2 different IP addresses (work & home). I suspect many others do this. But not Bubba. He can't look at this site from the work computers. He needs to find a new job that will let him. Do you have any openings? :rofl:
-Jason

 

[bubbadreier]

I can look, it is just all text with no pictures! It is weird and something I have been meaning to talk to Kevin about, no other site has trouble (facebook, msn, yahoo, any site I go to) loading pictures but for some reason they only occasionally load when I am at work!

 

[admin]

@Jason

Unique is what? IP address, User name, etc.? I only ask because on any given weekday I use the site utilizing 2 different IP addresses (work & home). I suspect many others do this.

Shorter less geeky answer: IP address, so it is not a perfect system. However, most sites use the same method, so for the most part, we are all still on a level playing field when benchmarking.
I also use a couple of other 3rd party external systems such as Com Score and Quantcast. This is what the big corporate online advertising world uses for benchmarking. They measure across several means and methods. Those numbers are lower, but still pretty darn good.
Longer geekier answer on how our internal system works for the total geeks in the audience:
(I had to look this up)
Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address (site), the amount of time since a previous request by the address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). The default timeout value is 30 minutes (can be changed), so if a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered. (Our default timeout is 1,440 minutes / 24 hours.)
Note: Visits only occur on PageType requests, that is, for any request whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the PageType and PagePrefix option, and not excluded by the OmitPage option. Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations and other factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate, rather, it should be considered a pretty close "guess".