Stats - Revisited

[Myr]

So, we are wrapping up the current version of stories as we work out the last few bugs.  It is now time for me to complete the design specifications for the next version, which is going to be narrowly focused on Stats and hopefully out a bit faster.

 

For those of you that have followed and remembered by various blathering on this topic remember, we have been keeping track of more detailed statistics since the start of the year.  The Stories update will allow us to extract and display those details.  Some will be completely public. Some will be author only.  We'd like to display the data in the most helpful way to you.  I know what I find helpful, but I'm an engineer that is used to looking at vast quantities of data and getting value out of it.  So my use case is probably rather different than yours.

 

So, please tell me what you feel would help you most as a writer here on GA and we'll see what we can do.

[Daddydavek]

I have only 3 stories on site, but the views keep going up and I've often wondered about the breakdown between members and guests.  

[Brayon]

I went back through the club to look at topics that I think where this was discussed.

 

I personally would like to see a breakdown between member and non-member readers, and repeat readers for members. Not asking to see who is looking at my stories, but if the same member has come back and re-read after a chapter's been posted.

 

I like how you posted in one thread the breakdown by country the top 23 countries traffic is coming from. While it's just a personal curiosity, I'd like to be able to see more of that.

 

If it's trackable, seeing if someone is coming to the story via the website search functions vrs. someone clicking on the url directly to the story. I've shared links to stories, both mine and others, and it would be helpful to see if they are being utilized.

 

I liked how you gave us a breakdown, even in a chart form, of the different genres, and how they are being used. With stories, being able to have multiple genres, is there a way to see that broken down further to show single genre stories, vrs. multiples?

[Sam Wyer]

I realise that this is not reliable for guests, but for members, seeing unique readers rather than overall views would be great.

[ColumbusGuy]

It would be nice to see the numbers of members vs. guests reading a story or chapter, but to me I'd like that figure to be genuine--right now, if the writer goes back to edit a chapter or just check it to remind himself of a detail, it counts as another view, which would seem to skew that result.  If the author's visits could be filtered out, that would be most useful.

 

It might be fun to see where our readers are from, but that too is going to be a knotty question: the majority will of course be from English-speaking countries, and maybe a few who know the language and are from other lands...so is it truly useful?  A curiosity yes, but hard to keep track of and to display in a meaningful way.  If you limit it to five top countries, nine times out of ten those will be the same across the board--US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia....

 

It might be more interesting to see how people are reading us--pc, phone, tablet...I'm not convinced that most people use their phones exclusively, but then, I'm a tech dinosaur who only got a cordless phone about seven years ago.  :)   I don't own a cell phone and never will after a brief stint with one while I was in rehab after a surgery back in 2014...then I still had my vision and found them too small to read on, and the tiny buttons too hard to manipulate...and what's the deal with putting buttons on the friggin' side of the thing where you can accidentally press it just by holding the stupid thing?

[Ivor Slipper]

I've never really understood the difference in 'Reads' between the figure shown if you see a story on screen and that you find if you click on actual chapters. Obviously the chapter one is more meaningful, but what actually creates the higher one? You can see all the information about the story on screen so there is no need to actually click on it.

 

Also, if it counts as a view each time I access the story chapter to answer a comment, that is going to distort figures so if author visits could be filtered out, that would be good.

[Myr]

2 hours ago, Ivor Slipper said:

Reads' between the figure shown if you see a story on screen and that you find if you click on actual chapters

 The story reads value shows all the combined chapters and the table of contents view counts.  Chapters show only the chapter counters.

2 hours ago, Ivor Slipper said:

Obviously the chapter one is more meaningful

No, not really.

 

When you are on the stories Table of Contents page...  If you see a large story view count, but a low chapter count, that means that your story description is failing to interest people and they aren't reading your story. 

If you see a large story view count and a similar value on the first chapter with a sharp drop off on the second, that shows a potential mismatch between your description (which worked) and failure to engage the reader in the first chapter.

If you are a slow poster of new content, you'll usually see a larger story count as people check for updates.  And also usually a sharp slope of lots of reads on the first chapter and diminishing each time.  This is common because a lot of people will re-read a story, especially if they enjoy it, when a new chapter is posted.

 

You can intuit a lot of data from those counts.

 

[Ivor Slipper]

3 hours ago, Myr said:

6 hours ago, Ivor Slipper said:

Reads' between the figure shown if you see a story on screen and that you find if you click on actual chapters

 The story reads value shows all the combined chapters and the table of contents view counts.  Chapters show only the chapter counters.

 

I can understand that with a story that has multiple chapters, but I am puzzled with single chapter stories.  One of mine, as an example, shows figures of 1219 and 860.

I virtually always pick stories to read from the Latest Story listing where it seems full details are available. Perhaps if readers are accessing in a different way this may explain the effect.

[Myr]

2 hours ago, Ivor Slipper said:

but I am puzzled with single chapter stories.  One of mine, as an example, shows figures of 1219 and 860.

Same thing I said above applies.  You've had 1219 load your table of contents page ("Story Views") and 860 load your Chapter 1.  The story system doesn't change how it handles short stories versus long ones.

In this case, the difference is because people read the description on your table of contents page and didn't read the chapter.  Or they checked back on the table of contents page to see if there was an update.  Or to see the comments, whatever. We don't know why...

[Ivor Slipper]

1 hour ago, Myr said:

Same thing I said above applies.  You've had 1219 load your table of contents page ("Story Views") and 860 load your Chapter 1.  The story system doesn't change how it handles short stories versus long ones.

In this case, the difference is because people read the description on your table of contents page and didn't read the chapter.  Or they checked back on the table of contents page to see if there was an update.  Or to see the comments, whatever. We don't know why...

 Okay, thanks. I just don't understand why people would load that page when it tells them nothing that isn't visible on screen already. Guess it will  remain one of those little mysteries

[Myr]

10 minutes ago, Ivor Slipper said:

Okay, thanks. I just don't understand why people would load that page when it tells them nothing that isn't visible on screen already. Guess it will  remain one of those little mysteries

It might be because once a story is past the new chapter notification list, that page is the only way to get to chapter 1?