Some Site Statistics

[whole diary]

[grahame]

The Coffee Shop finished 2020 in a flurry of activity, with over 2000 posts in December.

December is always busy with a daily advent quiz, but it's astonishing that in 2020, even after the coronavirus pandemic that has supressed train use (and we're all about train use) it actually grew on the previous year.  Perhaps that's because members are all fed up and wanted sometime to do.  And it could be because this forum has come to be a part of the daily routine for quite a number of well informed members, and as such a a valuable resource between ourselves and for any decision makers and influencers who care to read us - and we know that some do.

184 forum members were logged in during December, 99 of them on New Year's Eve alone. 15 had already been there in 2021 when I put my light out and turned over to go to sleep at a quarter past one.

Last 28 days, v previous 28 days:


Some numbers on that:


Where are people coming from, how many pages are they looking at, how often do they come back?

[grahame]

January 2021 ... no big changes in underlying stats from December 2020, though post numbers are down a little - perhaps because we haven't had an advent quiz ("only 333 days to Christmas")





Couple of comments - the spikes about a week ago were some sort of automata from the west coast of the USA - look odd, but no damage. Take them out, and things like the percentage from the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) goes up above 90% again. And notice the number of pages per visit by country, and bounce rates for the USA, indicate it accounts for less than 1% of pages served.

[grahame]

In May, our Coffee Shop traffic leapt for the wrong reasons. The sudden withdrawal of the majority of GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway)'s long distance train fleet for safety checks, and the timetable chaos, news flows and speculation that followed put our posting rate up five fold overnight. We had the second busiest month in a year, and that without any pre-planned publicity.  Later in the month, the Williams/Shapps report which announced Great British Railways generated another, but short lived traffic spike.  Graphed in sessions day by day (with the dotted line showing the previous month) it looks like this:



Across the whole month, users up by 31% to 4,800 in 19,500 sessions, with a session (visit) on average looking at six pages. 95% of sessions were from within the UK^▸ (United Kingdom). Bounce rate (people who arrive at a page and don't click onto a second page) was around 30% which I feel is a remarkably low figure; a bounce is not necessarily a bad thing is someone arrived at exactly the information they need.

Taking a wide look at some rather odd stats, here's a graph of bounce rate against time ... with the wild fluctuations at regular intervals being because the forum is so quiet in the middle of the night that one or two sessions in an hour (that's the sampling interval) can sent the rate down to 0% or up to 100%:

[grahame]

In two months time, the old Google Analytics data collection mechanism will be switched off ... and I need to find time if I can to see if I can work out and upgrade to the new system.  I probably can, but with a month just ended it seemed like a sensible time to look back and see how we have been doing recently before I start doing things that may results in glitches in data collection.  Here is a staring point:

The Coffee Shop finished 2020 in a flurry of activity, with over 2000 posts in December.

[snip]

184 forum members were logged in during December, 99 of them on New Year's Eve alone. 15 had already been there in 2021 when I put my light out and turned over to go to sleep at a quarter past one.

Taking the Google Analytic graphic from December 2020 and putting it alongside the April 2023 graphic:



Sadly, Google uses different scales - no overall easy conclusion even though it looks like we have grown, we really haven't - I would characterise our number of sessions and views as broadly stable / unchanged.

It's a different story with the number of posts - dropped from over 2,000 in December 2020 to over 1,100 last month - however,  December 2020 was a peak from a running rate in other months around that time of 1,300 and last month was marginally up from the current typical value.   79 members were logged in yesterday (compared to 99 on the previous day before - 31.12.2020).  And there were 155 different users logged in during April 2023 versus 184 in December 2020.

An interpretation?  A drift towards being much more of a rail user and specialist interest club and less of a site that's got new members registering, BUT a substantial number of guests arriving hear in searching for answers.  And we are very much an "every cloud has a silver lining" site - bad news such as the closure of Didcot to Oxford because of the failed bridge has been good news for our stats, generating a thread with over 100 posts.

[Mark A]

An interpretation?  A drift towards being much more of a rail user and specialist interest club and less of a site that's got new members registering, BUT a substantial number of guests arriving hear in searching for answers.  And we are very much an "every cloud has a silver lining" site - bad news such as the closure of Didcot to Oxford because of the failed bridge has been good news for our stats, generating a thread with over 100 posts.

Do I recall that it's the case that there's no route to upgrade the site to offer responsive web design (so it's user-friendly on mobiles) short of ditching the current content and also member subscriptions? That might well boost the 'New members registering', but if it's at the dual costs of a mega-admin session falling on the shoulders of the few* - and also site amnesia that's not so good.

Mark

*One!

[grahame]

Do I recall that it's the case that there's no route to upgrade the site to offer responsive web design (so it's user-friendly on mobiles) short of ditching the current content and also member subscriptions? That might well boost the 'New members registering', but if it's at the dual costs of a mega-admin session falling on the shoulders of the few* - and also site amnesia that's not so good.

Give me a month of Sundays ... though I suppose this month (with 3 bank holiday Mondays) is as close as I could get.

You HAVE given me a thought ... which I will put on the back burner for research until I have a chance; next few weeks are likely to be chaotic!