I’ve always loved keeping track of totally useless numbers and statistics so here is installment one of the 2009 year in numbers, mfdc statistics.

Last year was a record year for web site traffic with 117,263 hits. Compare that to 2008 were it was only 79,870 hits.

By month it broke out like:

It was on a steadily increase right from January through July when then things just fell off a cliff. I’m not exactly sure what happened there but it picked up again in October and then went right back into the toilet to end the year. I can understand the December numbers since there were really no web page updates or blog entries to speak of so the site got a little stale.

If remember last years summary I was giving my Canadian friends a hard time since I had more people from France, Poland, and Mexico visiting the site then from Canada and I’m glad to say that this year you didn’t let any other countries beat you. Unfortunately it wasn’t a matter of you beating anyone else but rather a rather large drop in the amount of traffic from every other international country.

Last year Canada accounted for 744 hits but this year it was only 364. I’m not sure what caused the huge drop in international visitors other then it’s possible that they are not being correctly accounted for. Last year there were 5,466 hits that couldn’t be attributed to a specific country or domain and this year that number was 11,098 so I have to believe that somewhere in this number here were countries not being accounted for correctly.

This year I added Google Analytics to the site which helped me track how people actually find there way to mfdc. Like I would expect the vast majority of visitors are coming directly to the site either by bookmark or just typing in the web address and most of those people or repeat viewers. This really isn’t surprising since the audience is really family and friends and since I don’t allow search engines to index any of the main site it limits what your going to find using a search engine.

None the less there are still what I would consider a large number of people who get to the site by coming from other locations like:

1. blogger.com
2. facebook.com
3. google.com
4. images.google.com
5. twitter.com
6. images.google.ca
7. notebooks-brazil.blogspot.com. (Beats me. When I saw this a couple of months back I tried to hunt it down but couldn’t find anything.)
8. images.google.co-uk

The other interesting thing is look at the search terms that people typed into a search engine that lead them to the site. As you would expect “mceachern family” and variations of peoples names with “mceachern” show up frequently but here’s a couple others exactly as they were typed into search engines that sent people to the blog

1. alex matisse
2. don’t forget your lunch box
3. antique bobsleds
4. sesame place secrets
5. sesame princeton
6. abe’s log cabin
7. canada trip family pictures
8. rhyming words with hiatus
9. pictures: “hello. anyone home?”
10. pictures of you, pictures of me.
11. picasso baseball pictures
12. zee zed canada

Some of these I can tell exactly where they ended up but others make absolutely no sense. I mean really, picasso baseball pictures, rhyming words with hiatus?

And now for the mfdc Top 5 most popular pages of the year, drum roll please…

1. Caroline’s first pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caragrace/index.html) Was anyone surprise by this?
2. Alex’s 7th Birthday Party (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/alexparty/index.html)
3. Caroline’s 2nd set of pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caroline/index.html)
4. Amanda and Ben’s Wedding (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/amandawedding/index.html)
5. Andrew’s 4th Birthday (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/andrewparty/index.html)