October 2009
Period: October 01 - October 31, 2009 based on Google Analytics

Monthly Page Views
Total Page Impressions : 2,531,516

• UK : 1,011,048


• Europe : 618,212


• USA/Canada : 583,344


• Rest of World : 318,913

Monthly Visitors
Visits : 951,482

• UK : 280,582


• Europe : 276,263


• USA/Canada : 298,375


• Rest of World : 96,301

Absolute Unique Visitors : 544,628
Due to the way data is computed by Google for certain reports, we are
unable to provide regional segmentation of unique IP metrics.

SOS previously used industry-standard log analysis software to track and calculate web metrics on our site. In December 2008, we elected to trial Google Analytics (GA) since it was evident from discussions with many advertisers that they are using GA on their own sites and would prefer that we used the same package for comparative purposes.

Visitors — GA differs significantly from log analysers, in that it can only track visitors who have Cookies and Javascript enabled on their computers (log analysers measure every visit, image load, page content serving etc). Human visitor counts will therefore be higher than GA advises, but there is no way of knowing by how much.

By inference, this means that GA also does not include page impressions generated by web robots and spiders that continuously crawl through popular web sites like ours indexing new forum threads, news pages, additional monthly articles and other human-readable content. Just as Page Hits were once the barometric currency of web traffic metrics (until technical advances proved they were less useful), electing to omit robot/crawler activity from our published stats delivers a more representative picture to advertisers of human visitor activity.

Page Views — previously, clicking on thumbnail images in SOS web articles opened a new browser window, which counted as an additional page view. This no longer happens. We changed to a more user-friendly javascript Image Gallery which does not show banners (at present) but shows multiple images without refreshing the page. So, where previously a visitor might have clicked and opened 3 "larger view" images while reading a single article, thus generating 3 page views in our old web statistics software, Google Analytics now only counts this as 1 page view.

Equally, many ISPs send their users through a caching proxy server. A caching proxy server can return a copy of a web site page that it has cached/stored locally without accessing our server at all, and the analytics program has no means to count this.

Geographic Analysis — GA benefits from very sophisticated proprietary global network tools to accurately monitor and track the true location of each site visitor. Like most web sites, SOS used to license a third-party Geo(graphic) IP database to look up where visitors connected. However, the use of proxy servers by broadband providers based outside the visitor's resident country is increasingly common and previous-generation statistical software had no 100% accurate way of knowing if a UK reader who connects via a US proxy is based in the UK or in the USA, raising the possibility of skewed Country/Region breakdowns. It is widely believed that the infrastructure and global reach of Google means that their analytics service provides more accurate and thus more useful geographic data for advertisers, hence the SOS regional breakdowns shown above are now generated directly from Google Analytics.