A look under the hood at Route 66 News

About a year ago, I moved Route 66 News from WordPress.com to a self-hosted setup. This gave me a lot more freedom to set up advertising and other controls for the website.

Being self-hosted also gave me access to a lot more data about who was visiting the website, courtesy of AWStats. Reviewing the information for 2012, I decided to offer some of these results to others, especially to those in tourism offices who wish to market the Mother Road to prospective tourists.

Some of the findings:

— The top 25 countries from where Route 66 News readers came:

  1. United States (about 75 percent of the page views)
  2. Great Britain
  3. Netherlands
  4. Germany
  5. Canada
  6. France
  7. European country (EU)
  8. Russia
  9. Sweden
  10. China
  11. Belgium
  12. Japan
  13. Ukraine
  14. Australia
  15. Ireland
  16. Norway
  17. Spain
  18. Brazil
  19. Poland
  20. Italy
  21. Israel
  22. Switzerland
  23. Czech Republic
  24. India
  25. Romania

Users from more than 180 countries visited Route 66 News in the past year.

— Total number of page views in 2012 was 2.78 million. That doesn’t count another 630,000 page views by robots, worms, and other non-human users.

— Total number of visitors was 651,000.

— The highest traffic month for page views was May, although numbers also were robust in April and July.

— During a typical 24-hour period, the busiest time for traffic was between 11 a.m. and noon.

— The busiest day of the week for page views was Monday, with Thursday not far behind.

— Average duration per visit was nearly 7 minutes.

— The “Route 66 guide to the ‘Cars’ movie” post, from back in mid-2006, remains the most popular post, with more than 86,000 page views in 2012 alone.

— Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser, but with just 29.4 percent of the share and falling. Firefox and Safari browsers are in the high teens, with Chrome coming in at 11 percent.

— The top search phrase that landed visitors to Route 66 News was “route 66 attractions,” but with only 4.3 percent of the share. The phrase “radiator springs” was No. 2 with 2.9 percent. More than 79,000 different search phrases bring people to the site.

If you have other questions about Route 66 News’ traffic data, ask in the comments section, and I’ll try to answer them.

3 thoughts on “A look under the hood at Route 66 News

  1. Thank you, Ron, for sharing this most valuable information. The statistics you’ve provided should be extremely helpful for those who also have internet presence in the aspect of promoting Route 66 as well as businesses and roadside locations along Route 66. The one area of information which I find quite useful is the hours, days and months when your internet traffic was the highest. Would it be possible for you to expand more in those areas by providing the complete internet traffic rankings for each of the 12 months of the year, as well as the 7 days of the week, and each of the 24 hour time slots? Knowing which are the lowest rankings of each of those categories is just as inportant as knowing which one rated #1 in each of those categories. Thanks in advance for your help.

    Happy New Year.

    the landrunner

  2. — In terms of days of the week, there’s very little difference. It is safe to say that Saturday is the worst day, traffic-wise, but the difference is less than 10 percent.

    — In hours of the day, the slowest time is 3 a.m., although the period from midnight to 5 a.m. is slow in general. Traffic starts picking up at 6 a.m. and rises until the peak time of 11 a.m. to noon. There’s a slight drop-off after that. Traffic doesn’t drop substantially until after 10 p.m., when it settles into that wee-hours lull.

    — Other strong traffic generators are the Restaurant, Schedule of Events, Campgrounds, Lodging, and Attractions pages, and my interview with George Maharis a few years ago.

  3. No questions here, but hearty congratulations for your very important contribution to the Route 66 community — and those who might become part of it. Route 66 News has obviously become one of the most useful tools people can easily find for information about current events, news updates, and other facets of the route. Thanks for the time and effort you’ve put into it, Ron!

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