PPRuNe Stats

[ABX]

Many moons ago one was able to access the daily/weekly/monthly statistics for PPRuNe, you know, number of hits per d/w/m, where the hits came from and other interesting stuff. I have been poking around for 1/2 an hour but I cannot find that same information at the moment. Has this information become privileged now? Are we mere members still able to view it?

I would dearly like to know if PPRuNe is bigger than Airliners.net. A-net claim that they are the biggest aviation site on the net and get 800 000 hits a day, given that the D&G forum in the Dununder section alone gets 130 000 hits per day, I suspect that PPRuNe is bigger or at least comparable.

If someone in-the-know posts an answer here I would appreciate it.

Cheers,
ABX

[Bushfiva]

Airliners.net is several times larger than pprune.org. Look at sites such as Alexa, Quantcast, Statsaholic and Compete to confirm.

[ABX]

Thanks Bushy, I had a look at those stats and you seem to be right. I say 'seem' because the stats need a little interpretation: the stats given are for north America (at least that is what I gathered from the info on the page), PPRuNe claims most hits are from UK/Europe and Australia, does this mean that those hits are not included in the stats supplied?

Also, can a mod, Danny or Rob reply to my question about the access to PPRuNe's own internal stats? I used to find it interesting when I could access it.

Cheers.

[Bushfiva]

Google Trends offers geolocation data: Google Trends for Websites: pprune.org, airliners.net (http://trends.google.com/websites?q=pprune.org%2C+airliners.net&geo=all&date=all&sort=0).

[mutt]

Thanks for the link......

Its interesting to note that people who looked at Pprune also looked at other professional aviation sites, whilst people who looked at airliners also looked at plane spotting sites. I guess this is a great indication of the audience.

Mutt

[ABX]

Thanks again Bushy, I must agree that a-net seems to be far ahead of prune then - not that I have any interest in either site other than being a reader of both.

What is the difference - if any - between 'unique visitors' and 'hits'?

Cheers.

[Bushfiva]

A hit is every request to a web site. A single page may generate many hits: each image is a hit, for example, as is the text, the .css call and so on.

A page view is the presentation of a web page to a user. It requires anything from 1 to a bazillion hits.

A session is the time an individual visits a site for.

A unique user is an individual visitor to a site. An individual may visit a site one or more times over the course of the measurement period, typically a month. Compare with the total number of users, which is effectively the total number of sessions. Since UU's the closest advertisers with a "magazine" mentality can get to the site's "circulation", it's required for ABCE audits. But it's no use for planning site capacity, for example.

In reality, things are quite vague: http is a stateless protocol, so if you only use site logs to generate statistics, it's difficult to determine when a session ends. If a visitor leaves your page open in a tab all day, and clicks on it once every 29 minutes, it's difficult to decide whether that's one session or many. Similarly for UU's: by convention, you need an IP address plus one other piece of data (cookie, etc). With AJAX, where parts of a page can be changed without refreshing the entire page, it's hard to decide when it stops being the first page view, and starts being the second. There are lots of techniques for improving the quality of site statistics.

There are many other metrics, including site depth and site bounce. In reality, you use them for two purposes: to plan capacity, and to satisfy advertisers. In the latter case, most advertisers trust their own data more than yours.