Our Visitors

Still no news on the next batch of referrals, we are hoping that we will hear something at some point this week. The early rumors were that this batch was going to be really big and get through the middle of November. While this would have been great and we would love to see it happen we really never believed it. Early last week there was another rumor floating around that they were going to only get through 2 days of referrals. Then there was another rumor late last week that they were going to get through 6 days which is probably more likely although we hope that they get through at least a couple more days than that. We got some interesting mail this past week in the form of a check from Google for the ads I have up on this site. I put the ads up about a year ago not expecting to earn any significant money. My earnings started out kind of slow but over the past 6 months I have been averaging around $10 a month. We are obviously not going to be able quit our jobs and retire from the advertising but a couple $100 checks a year are a nice little contribution to Grace's college fund. I am actually a bit surprised at the amount of traffic that this site gets. We started this site just as a sort of journal for our friends and family to keep track of our progress with the adoption. But it turns out more than half of the traffic to this site is from people we don't know which is fine with us as we really like following along with other people's adoption websites as well. It does make me a little nervous though that we get so many strangers looking at our website since we have some pretty personal info up here and we plan to post pictures of Grace once we get them. I started tracking all visitors to this site about a year ago just to make sure I wasn't getting any weirdos visiting the site. The tracking software I use allows me to see all kinds of cool info about who is coming to the site. Although I can't see exactly who is coming to the site it gives me a pretty good idea. I can see the city and state where the the computer is that the visitor is coming from. I can see the Internet Service Provider (Comcast, AOL) that the user is using or if the visitor comes to the website from a work computer I can see the company name. I can also tell how the visitor got to our website, if they linked from another website or if they found it through a search engine I can see what they typed it to find it. Maybe it is just the computer geek in me that finds this interesting but I thought you might find some of these statistics interesting as well

This is the main statistics summary screen. Since I started tracking I have had almost 8,500 visits to the website and those visitors viewed my pages over 23,000 times.

I have been averaging about 250 visitors and 1000 page views a month. Although the last two months my traffic really increased because the chart that I created comparing referral trends last year vs. this year got posted on all kinds of other adoption websites and really increased my traffic.

What I find most interesting is where the visitors are coming from. The dots on the map above represent where the last 100 visitors to my site are from. The majority of the traffic comes from the US but I get a significant amount of traffic from Canada, Europe, Australia and even China. The first time I got a visit from China I got a little nervous as I thought it could be the China Center of Adoption Affairs checking up on me but I think it was just a parent in China getting their child who went to my site. Last month our website was posted on an Chinese adoption forum in Denmark. I tried to get on the website to see what they were saying but the website was in Danish so I couldn't read it and figure out how to register. So if you don't know us don't be afraid to leave us a message on our guest book and say hello.