Uruguay Dreaming Update

Posted on June 28, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Three months ago, I wrote a Note to My Readers to offer some behind-the-scenes statistics about the site and its readers. Since the profile of readers has changed somewhat over the past three months, I thought it might be a good idea to provide you with an update.

First, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my blog; and my special thanks to all of you that contribute to the blog on a regular basis in the form of comments.

Below are some recent statistics related to the Uruguay Dreaming site, collected by Google Analytics. The data covers the last three and a half months. I am hoping this information will be helpful to bloggers in the Uruguayan expat community, and to anyone curious to know more about the level of interest in Uruguay.

The geographical location of the readers has changed. Even though the number of US readers has continued to increase, it has grown much faster in other countries. As a consequence, the US now represents only 50% of the readers, Uruguay comes second with 15%, Canada third with 4% and 95 other countries make up the remaining 31%.

Visits by new readers have been growing slowly but steadily during this period, from 26 to 80 visits per day.

Visits by returning readers has also been increasing (from 42 to 65 per day), but the pages read per returning reader has remained constant, around 4.5 per visit.

4,905 unique visitors in 9,807 visits and 45,810 page views in the last three and a half months. Half of the visitors came to the site one day only, read an average of five pages and never came back.

160 readers have visited the site 101-200 times, 482 between 51-100, 625 between 26-50, 570 between 15-25, 566 between 9-14 times, all others, fewer than 9 times.

25% of the readers arrive directly, 25% arrive from a Google search. 9% are referrals from ChuckStull’s site, the remaining 41% referrals from a hundred other sites.

The traffic is heaviest on Thursdays, weakest on Saturdays.

Search hits can vary dramatically from day to day and from week to week. Traffic seems to increase in sudden spurts instead of gradually.

Three months ago, there were five Google search hits per day, now about 50. I assume this change has to do with the increase in the Page Rank value. In a search for “blog Uruguay” the site used to appear on page twelve. Now it is on the first page near the top.

Yahoo is the second most popular search site and is responsible for about 10% of the search hits. AOL is third with about 4%, MSN-Live Search about 2%.

There are currently 74 posts and 430 comments, contained within 19 categories.

Judging by the most popular posts, readers seem to be primarily interested in reading about: Cost of Living, Real Estate Issues, Crime, Immigration and Naturalization.

Articles I like the best are near the very bottom in popularity. I am not sure what to make of it, but I’ll try not to take it personally.

About two and a half months ago, I created the Uruguay Dreaming Forum to allow readers to communicate more easily with one another and with the Uruguayan expat community. The intention may have been good, but in practice it has not been very utilized. The truth is there are other more successful and more established forums about Uruguay. Also, the community is probably too small for so many boards. So I decided to disable it in order to push contributors to band together elsewhere, so that they are more effective. The existing entries in the Uruguay Dreaming board will continue to be viewable and searchable by everyone, but you won’t be able to make new ones.

Thank you,

Brazzie

P.S. If you are new to the site, don’t forget to check the UY Resources, the FAQ and the About Me pages.

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15 Responses to “Uruguay Dreaming Update”

JP on June 29th, 2007 1:28 am

You have been doing a great job brazzie. Congrats!
Wilbur on June 29th, 2007 6:33 am

Your statistics are of course flawed as the origin of the IP addresses doesn’t always relate to the location of the user.

The growth is excellent. Keep at it and before long you’ll be thinking 80 visitors a day was a drop in the bucket.
Brazzie on June 29th, 2007 8:48 am

Hi Wilbur, you are right. Any statistics related to web traffic are imperfect at best. Google Analytics (GA) however is better than the rest. It seems to do a MUCH better job identifying the location of a given IP than other tools. But I am sure it gets it wrong sometimes.

Also GA is able to solve the AOL continuously changing IP (in the same session) problem and correctly identify the activity as belonging to one user (Urchin tracker cookies). Other tools log that user as being 10 or more different users. Because the Google tool is a piece of Javascript code on the client-side, it tends to underestimates traffic because some people turn off cookies and/or Javascript. If any of you know more about how Google Analytics works please write in.

Whatever the case may be, as long as one continues to use the same tool one can follow trends, even if the absolute numbers can off somewhat.

It is just a hunch, but I suspect traffic will level off soon.
Brazzie on June 29th, 2007 10:59 am

I just checked the average daily stats using the server-side Webalizer tool:

Avg pages per day 3152
Avg visits per day 509

Awstats, also a server-side tool gives these numbers instead:

Avg pages per day 1745
Avg visits per day 220

One is roughly twice of what Google reports and the other more than four times. I think Google’s results are closer to reality, because it does a better job at ignoring indexing bot traffic. Although, this site indicates that Google Analytics may under report by 11-15% or more. http://www.idealware.org/blog/2007/06/google-analytics-underreporting-or-just.html
Wilbur on June 30th, 2007 6:53 am

Yes, google is monitoring users that have javascript running, which equates more or less to human users as opposed to the email gathering bots for spammers.

I could count the google figures as much more accurate than the other stat programs. There are many many more bots scanning your website than humans with cookies/javascript turned off.

My point about IP addresses was that if you identify the location of an IP, you do not necessarily identify the location of the person.

For example, I am in Uruguay, but do all of my surfing via IP addresses in the USA.
Brazzie on June 30th, 2007 7:07 am

Wilbur, thanks for the explanation and for the clarification. I forgot to consider that some people use proxies on a regular basis.

Now back to client-side versus server-side issue, I assume that if someone clears their cookies on a regular basis, like I do, that person will appear to be a new user to Google Analytics. This means that the statistics related to new versus returning users should be interpreted with caution.
juan del plata on June 30th, 2007 7:31 am

i clear my cookies everytime i shut down my browser, and usually more often than that. do you use proxies for security reasons? anyway, thanks brazzie for all the word lists i much appreciate them and all the other research you do.
juan
Clay on June 30th, 2007 11:30 pm

Thanks for the info. I have been interested in Uruguay or about three years and this is the most relevant web site I have found.

Clay
Tacoma, WA
USA
Ant on July 1st, 2007 11:13 am

Brazzie, this is great… hope you find new topics to keep this site active. Thank you for making an expat’s life easier in UY.
Brazzie on July 1st, 2007 11:32 am

Thank you all for the words of encouragement.
Wilbur on July 2nd, 2007 9:13 am

Yes, I suspect if you clear cookies you will appear at a new user to the Google states. The logfile state programs, however will count many nonhuman users.

I don’t use a proxy as they are usually a pain the you know where and don’t necessarily work with all programs.

I use a VPN that makes an encrypted connection to the host system in the USA and my gateway is directly on the internet connection in the USA. The Uruguayan IP is just a tunnel.

A proxy would instead relay the packets from one system to another (sometimes added a flag that it was sent through a proxy). You need to configure your applications to connect to the proxy.

It can be interesting to say look at prices on Travelocity.com with my computer and one next to it connected to a local IP.
la vieja on July 4th, 2007 7:44 am

Brazzie,
Your forum has been an excellent resource. Recent decrease in interest may have a seasonal etiology. Northern hemisphere summer and vacation seasons in conjunction with the winter in the south may be a disincentive for browsing Uy sites in general. It seems that your forum readers were a regular group some of whom are familiar via other blogs and forums. You may wish to think of this as quality versus quantity.
Thanks for an excellent site. See you soon in Mvd?!
Michael on July 4th, 2007 8:40 am

Brazzie, I wish to compliment you on the excellent reporting you are doing on life in Uruguay.

I have been a reporter and editor at daily newspapers for more than thirty years. So I do have plenty of experience to know what I am talking about. Also, I did some travel writing while my wife and I lived on the French island of Terre de Haut for a year. So I am cognizant of how much work that involves. (Answer: plenty.)

We currently live in Sarasota, Florida, and we may retire in another country.

I like very much to learn on-the-ground information like the kind you are coming up with on Uruguay.

You say you are not much of a writer, but you must realize that what you are creating is the essence of good reporting.

You are lifting images and nuances of culture and conveying them neatly to many people around the world. Your style is relaxed and transparent but not too chatty, and conveys a ton of information.

Great work!

Regards,

Michael Pollick
Brazzie on July 4th, 2007 8:45 am

Thank you Michael, I am humbled by your kind words and appreciate the encouragement.

Although, for the record, I should clarify that I am writing this blog from Massachusetts, not on-the-ground (for more detail please refer to the About Me page).
Brazzie on July 4th, 2007 9:56 am

La Vieja, you may be right about the seasonal effect on the forum.

I am concerned however that new people posting questions on the forum might not get the quality and speedy response they may be expecting.

For a forum to be useful (meaning that the information contained in it can be trusted), you need a group of at least 10 local expats that contribute on a regular basis about the subjects they have experience in.

For some reason, only a few members of UY expat community ever contributed to the UD forum, even fewer contributed on a regular basis. I have to assume that it is because the forum is not needed or wanted.

Since with fewer contributors the forum represents a lot of extra work for me, I chose to close it for the time being.

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