Summary of all traffic
to wallace-id.com
2002 through 2009
Key data from table noted here:
- Total Independent Page Views Analyzed
- 2009 — 518,013
- 2008 — 535,084
- 2002 — 235,003
- 120% increase since 2002
- 3.2% decrease since 2008
- Average Page Views per Day
- 2009 — 1,420
- 2008 — 1,480
- 2002 — 644
- 120% increase since 2002
- 4.1% decrease since 2008
- Average Homepage Views per Day
- 2009 — 255
- 2008 — 226
- 2002 — 109
- 134% increase since 2002
- 13% increase since 2008
- Average Number of People per Month
- 2009 — 9,202
- 2008 — 12,230
- 2002 — 4,049
- 127% increase since 2002
- 25% decrease since 2008
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Four Season Mountain Recreation
is a big theme at wallace-id.com.
A chart of the interest in each of four areas is
shown below.
- Lookout Pass Ski Area
- January 2009 — 132 page views/day
- January 2008 — 189 page views/day
- January 2002 — 42 page views/day
- 214% increase since 2002
- 30% decrease since 2008
- Silver Mountain Ski Area
- January 2009 — 96 page views/day
- January 2008 — 105 page views/day
- January 2002 — 53 page views/day
- 81% increase since 2002
- 8.6% decrease since 2008
- Route of the Hiawatha
- July 2009 — 238 page views/day
- July 2008 — 321 page views/day
- July 2002 — 176 page views/day
- 35% increase since 2002
- 26% decrease since 2008
- Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes
- July 2009 — 92 page views/day
- July 2008 — 103 page views/day
- July 2003 — 69 page views/day
- 33% increase since 2003
- 11% decrease since 2008
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Page Views and Human Visitors, 2002-2009
(click image to open entire chart in separate window)
2009 slice
showing
adjusted page views
and
calculated human visitors
by month.
The spike in October due to
Budget Travel article
is further analyzed below.
The fact that all other data points lie beneath the eight year linear
regressions reflects a downturn in overall traffic.
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Each month, the total number of recorded page views is first adjusted to
remove the retrieval of the initial Snowfall Log in-line frame associated
with the homepage since December 2004, and other in-line frame helper files
called by specific pages implemented since then.
This gives an approximation of "independent page views." If a browser does
not support in-line frames, then normal links to appropriate subordinate pages
are presented instead. Even though such pages could then be accessed, traffic
thru the domain would be falsely elevated if
these dependent .htm files were not subtracted before proceeding.
The chart to the left plots these adjusted page
views along with the
calculated human population that these page
views represent. To get this number, the proportion of requests made by robot
operating systems is subtracted from the adjusted page views, and the
remaining page views are divided by the average number of pages requested
per visit for that month. There is significant variance
of both factors from month to month.
96 month averages (± standard deviation)
- robot operating system retrievals = 5.7% ± 3.0%
(range = 0.8% to 15.0%)
- pages per host (visit) = 3.86 ± 0.54
(range = 2.52 to 5.21)
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Community Service, 2002-2009
(click image to open entire chart in a separate window)
The traffic spike in October was localized to people seeking information
about relocation, recreation and festivals. The festival traffic spike in
July was mainly tied to the well attended Slippery
Gulch 2009 town party, when 1210 visits were made to the festival's
webpage. Depot Day visitation crested in May
with 748 page views; Gyro Days crested in June
with 446 visitors. The Huckleberry Festival saw
1160 internet visitors in August, while the
Yuletide Lighting Festival attracted
369 December visitors. Seven "First Fridays" were promoted for the WBCA
at wallace-id.com during 2009.
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The main reason for establishing wallace-id.com in 1998 was to provide
essential information to those people thinking about vacationing or moving
here. Traffic is measured in page views per day (pv/day).
| |
Jan 2002
pages |
pv/day |
Dec 2009
pages |
pv/day |
| relocation |
3 |
17.3 |
15 |
93.6 |
| festivals |
3 |
19.5 |
22 |
75.0 |
| maps/aerial photos |
16 |
33.0 |
20 |
53.4 |
| history |
12 |
28.0 |
14 |
59.8 |
| general recreation |
7 |
51.4 |
22 |
89.0 |
| local businesses |
19 |
46.1 |
23 |
168.5 |
|
Recreation Promotion, 2002-2009
(click image to open entire chart in a separate window)
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I moved here in 1993 because
Lookout Pass and
Silver Mountain ski areas
are a dozen Interstate miles east and west of Wallace. When the
Route of the Hiawatha
mountain bike trail was created as a result of efforts by
the Taft Tunnel Preservation Society in 1999, I added this attraction as
my third recreational websuite. In 2003, as the 72-mile
Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes
paved bike trail was nearing completion,
I added this fourth
websuite to wallace-id.com.
This became the prototype for the large
Friends of the Coeur d'Alene Trails website
that promotes ALL bicycle venues in the region.
The general recreation curve
includes nine years of
snowfall logs and commentary that tie the two complementary Silver Valley
ski areas together, in competition with the other three ski areas
available to folks in Spokane.
In December 2009, these nine snow logs were consulted 40 times a day.
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Top Three Pages, 2002-2009
(click image to open entire chart in a separate window)
96 month averages
(± standard deviation)
and totals
- homepage
181 ± 64 page views/day
(range 81 to 480)
526,533 total views
(15.3% of all traffic)
- business
47 ± 13 page views/day
(range 25 to 79)
135,982 total views
(3.9% of all traffic)
- weather
37 ± 16 page views/day
(range 19 to 89)
107,806 total views
(3.1% of all traffic)
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Interest in local weather and business has remained rather constant over the
years and may reflect a saturated local audience. The
weather page
naturally gets the most attention during winter, while the summer months
see the most traffic through the
business page.
On the other hand,
the homepage reflects
a continuing interest in our town that depends on outside media events
more than seasonal variation.
The spike in October (14,868 page views) was the result
of Wallace being named as one of
"the ten coolest small towns in America"
in the October edition of Budget Travel magazine and website.
The story was picked up and amplified by the search engines.
Overall in October, 66.4% of all HTML page views were due to
search engine queries, up slightly from 63.8% in September, when Google
accounted for about half of the search traffic. The extra traffic reflected
in the October spike happened on four days and differentiated the major
search engines.
|
date
|
all visits
|
Google
|
Bing
|
Yahoo
|
|
Oct 3
|
1808
|
761
|
54
|
407
|
|
Oct 4
|
1446
|
643
|
52
|
273
|
|
Oct 21
|
2,728
|
473
|
1,529
|
35
|
|
Oct 24
|
1,662
|
219
|
942
|
17
|
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Various Pages & Suites, 2002-2009
(click image to open entire chart in a separate window)
Interest in
Lana
Turner,
The 1313 Club,
Avant Studio,
my
curriculum vitae,
and the
defunct
Independence Lead Mines Company
[gone.html]
all generated a low steady state
of activity during 2009.
- Lana Turner — 10 pv/day
- The 1313 Club — 9.5 pv/day
- Avant Studio — 13 pv/day
- Greg Marsh — 17 pv/day
- [Independence] — 9.1 pv/day
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This chart shows that the main effect of the outside media's four day focus
on Wallace during October was to double the traffic to Jim Carpenter's eleven
page websuite,
Silver Valley Real Estate.
Interest in real estate had previously peaked in June 2007 at 81 page
views/day, but then fell to a low of 45 pv/day in March 2008 as the general
economy of the nation fell. By June 2009 it had recovered to 61 pv/day.
However,
in October 2009, it shot to an average of 165 pv/day as the search engines
broadcast our "coolness." I believe that this presages a local housing
recovery... Indeed, January 2010 access log analysis shows 73 pv/day versus
59 pv/day a year earlier for real estate requests.
And this just in: 84 real estate pages were viewed each day in February.
Interest in
Snow Cat Parts
continues to increase in a regular and seasonal way as Pat Foster builds
his machinist business from his cabin/shop on
Dobson Pass. January traffic to his webpage(s) beginning in 2003 was
7, 14, 23, 27, 37, 38 and 47 page views/day in 2009. Classic improvement!
Google has ranked Pat at #1 for several key words and phrases
from the beginning and this has enabled him to increase his product
line substantially. I just added a third page,
Tools, Accessories,
and New Old Stock,
to complement his second
Available Parts
page.
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Lodging Promotion, 2002-2009
(click image to open entire chart in a separate window)
Traffic to these varied Wallace lodging opportunities maximized in
different months.
- Beale House Bed & Breakfast
37.5 pageviews/day in November
- Wallace Inn
34.2 pageviews/day in July
- Ryan Hotel
18.4 pageviews/day in June
- Stardust Motel
12.5 pageviews/day in July
- River Sy
vacation rental
5.7 pageviews/day in February
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This graph is a textbook illustration of three of the four ways that an
internet lodging promotion can proceed throughout a year. Traffic can stay
relatively level (River Sy), vary with the
season (Stardust Motel,
Ryan Hotel, Wallace
Inn), get perturbed upward (Beale House),
or get perturbed downward (not on my shift).
Why do we see this behavior? Is there a difference in search engine
performance? When Google is queried for beale house, it picks our
Beale House as #1, over the more famous ones in New Hampshire, Maryland,
and Massachusetts. Likewise, Google returns the Wallace vacation rental
as #1 when asked for river sy... but then, a ryan hotel query
also goes to wallace-id.com as #1. Time and time again over the
years, I have demonstrated that my neural network based website architecture
takes any page I want to #1. So unequal
search engine optimization is not responsible for the different traffic
patterns. What is?
Association with other media is obviously key.
The Beale House is tied into
a vast association of Bed and Breakfasts, and they evidently made an effort
to publicize their website during the year. OR something else happened to
make November go from the lowest traffic for seven years to the highest
traffic in 2009.
The Wallace Inn,
Ryan Hotel, and
Stardust Motel are tied into traditional
seasonal media outlets, and their internet traffic shows this.
The River Sy sits quietly beside the river,
waiting for its day in the sun.
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I created wallace-id.com and
silver-valley.com
in 1998 to popularize my new
home in North Idaho as a way to mitigate the economic depression of the community
and myself. I was a scientist for seventeen years before deciding at 45 that
I had done enough chemistry, but not enough skiing. So in 1993, I ended my tour
of duty as the vagabond scientist following state-of-the-art mass spectrometers
around the world and bought a house in the mountains where I wanted to end up,
and set about to become a "computer consultant" entrepreneur.
Thank you for your time and interest in Wallace Idaho.
From January 1, 2002, through December 31, 2011,
5,085,944 successful requests for html, doc, pdf
and kml/kmz pages were recorded and analyzed. As documented in my
greg4mss@hotmail.com
