How to use the Global stats page
- What is the Global stats page?
- User content
- Site usage
- Google searches
- Google views per month
- Miscellaneous
What is the Global stats page?
For the most part the Global statistics page should be at least superficially self-explanatory. But you might be wondering what some of the numbers stand for. If you hover your mouse over any of the statistics you'll see a tooltip giving more explanation of what that number represents:
User content
This is really just basic content stats. How many stores, products, and such are there in total?
Site usage
These statistics reflect users visiting our site, in contrast with external activity like Google searches. The page views are heavily skewed by the many bots (programs) out there that index or scrape this site. I try my best to filter out the page views that are done by such bots, but that requires them to declare themselves as such. Not all bots do. Hence my calling them "qualified", with this caveat being the qualifier.
The "link-outs" to Zazzle are most likely 100% human, owing to how I collect this information. Bots don't click on page links the way humans do.
Google searches
This is much more interesting information. "Views" in this context is more formally called "impressions". Meaning it showed up as a search result somewhere and the user might have seen it. Read how Google defines impressions.
"Stores with views" is the most interesting statistic to me personally. It's really an accumulation of storefronts, products, designs, and collections that all show up in Google search results, grouped by store. At the time of this writing, 100% of stores have shown up in search results.
One important caveat though. Let's say you created a store a few minutes ago. You wouldn't expect Google to know about that right away. Google's webcrawler probably won't revisit our website for the better part of a week. And then odds are good it won't get to your store on that day. Google cannot visit all of a large website every time it visits that site. It can only get to part of it with each visit. A page it has not visited will not show up in search results. This tends to skew the numbers negatively.
So we add an "aging window". For the purpose of these Google stats, we pretend a store doesn't exist for the 2 weeks after it was created. At the time of this writing, a lot of new stores are brand new. So when I remove the 2-week aging window, this 100% figure drops to 94%. Which means that at least 6% of the stores here are under 2 weeks old.
Google views per month
This is just summing up the daily total number of times during each month our pages showed up in Google searches. If the latest month seems low, keep in mind that it represents only part of the current month. We can't count tomorrow's searches. Not yet at least.
Miscellaneous
These are mostly here to give you a sense of some of the large numbers we deal with on a daily basis. It's interesting to see that at this time there are 74k products but there are about 640k images, mostly for those products. That's about 8.6 images per product. If you're feeling really nerdy, you'll be interested to know that they take up over 28 GB of storage space. Averaging about 44 KB per image.
If you're familiar with the Trademark Search and Trademark Analysis features, you may find it interesting that there are over 4M trademarks in our database. That's how many active trademarks the US Patent and Trademark Office has made public, going all the way back to the mid 19th century.
The Zazzle niches number is relevant to users of our Niche Explorer and Niche Analysis tools. This is how many Zazzle searches have been transformed into niche ideas. Zazzle publishes these for Google and other search engines as actual pages they should index and make available for search. As you can see, Zazzle tries to promote niches that hooked customers to make purchases on the premise that other people will be searching for the same things. And it's a big number.