Getting hits?

[Lars Havemann]

My webcomic is up for about a month and I get about 30 visits per day. I had 1200 visits since the start and the best thing happening to me was a link from Writer's Block. I had about 70 visits one day.

The last few days weren't that good. Since I started a storyline less people come. I hope this won't last.

There are still no other webcomics referring to my site. I want to change that, but I just don't have any time to start 'project fanart' this week.

I think the only way to get hits is to get your link on other peoples sites. To do that, you've got to have a good comic and you've got to stay good. Update often (no one likes to wait a week for a new strip!). Find some sites that share your humour and do fanart!

Other good possibility: Dropdowns.
Unfortunately the only dropdown that suits me is the 'socially unacceptable dropdown'. My comic just doesn't fit anywhere else...

It sucks to get no feedback. People don't use my forum or mail me. This really get's me down!

Sorry about this long complaining text, but I think I needed to write it.

Have a nice day/Good you luck with your webcomic!

[KODAMA]

:d... if you want lots of feedback,
get a guestbook or a forum that that doesn't require "joining" or "logging in"...

Or you could specifically ask for feedback... heh..
(not that that really ever works)

[DunnBoyz]

My visits have suddenly fell off in the last week. I still average around 50 a day but I don't have the triple digit days of earlier this month. I beat the visits for the previous month, so I am happy in that regard.

[ZOMBIE USER 10963]

Our visits keep getting bigger each month, but not by much. Our visits keep dropping into the single digits.

[ZOMBIE USER 11441]

No one reads my comics, but...sniff...that's okay.

[ZOMBIE USER 7833]

Well, you apparently do 4 different comics, and have only posted in these forums 9 times. What do you expect?

[ZOMBIE USER 8296]

I would be more impressed with the number of daily visits I get if I didn't know that about a third of the people who read my comic are friends

[ZOMBIE USER 10963]

I don't even look at visits anymore, they keep getting lower. I just look at the hits, to see how many people come back.

[Ghastly]

I use Extreme Tracker to keep track of my visits rather than the Keenspace Webalizer. It gives me a number that's about 2/3 the number that Webalizer gives me but Extreme Tracker has the featurre to show Unique Visits rather than just the total visits so it only counts each I.P. address once a day so reloads and revisits won't affect my count. Then it's just a matter of taking your weekly total of Unique Visits and dividing it by the number of days per week you publish a comic (easy in my case since I only publish one comic per week) and you get a good picture of the number of individual readers you have per week.

Extreme Tracker also lets readers check out my stats and what not too which is kind of neat. I always like checking on where my referrals are coming from particularily when I see they're coming from a message forum. That's a good way to find out what people think of your comic.

I have a "TheCounter.Com" counter on the bottom of my page. It's not the most accurate but it gives me an okay ball park figure of how many people in total have visited my webpage since I started it.

This week is the very first week I managed to get more than 8000 unique visits to my webcomic. I feel like celebrating. Of course Sexy Losers (which sends me most of my traffic), another hentai yonkonmanga (and the comic that inspired me to create a webcomic) publishes only once a week gets more visits in a day than I get in a week so I've still got a long way to go before I can wag stick with the big boys. Still, 8000 visitors/week was like a milestone target of mine for such a long time. I'd come so close but always just miss the mark. Next target I guess is 9000 readers a week.

[Bliss]

Or, we can do what I do.

Have one of the neighborhood kids pick a number between one and ten. Take that number and multiply it by the number of fridays in the month of june. Then, divide that by the number of comics on Keenspace, finally add in two cups of vanilla ice-cream.

I don't rightly know what the result is, but it sure helps me sleep at night.

[Kisai]

Webalizer, despite it's best efforts IS running on the keenspace server, so if chunks of the apache log file go missing or whatnot, then there is a hole that webalizer doesn't consider.

Do not use the "hits" as any indicator of anything, it's a measure of how many times a browser has connected to your site to download something, nothing more, doesn't even matter if it did successfully.

If anything is an accuracy mark, "Pages" is, as this only counts html files loaded, but however doesn't take into account reloads. So anytime someone visits the site it's incremented, not like "hits" where every single http request is counted.

"Sites" is the measure if you are looking for how many people frequent your site, still people on dial-up get a new IP every time, so this is also not going to be accurate without 'cookie'ing every user and assuming they keep the cookie.

An External counter has both an advantage and a disadvantage, the advantage is that it's represented as a single-execution, so it will only be hit once per page, and it's also not hosted on keenspace, so it's independant from being trashed by a system problem on keenspace. However, the disadvantage is that it IS external, and if the remote system goes down, you get no tracking. If you were to get six different trackers and put them on your pages, you would probably find that they all have different numbers. There is no way to actually tell which tracking system is the most accurate, because the only "accurate" measure is to check the log files of the site being tracked and perform an analysis on that. That's assuming the log files are never damaged and that relevant information is kept in the log files.

As a popularity gauge, hits and visits are meaningless, since they are affected by the site design. Pages (single html files loaded) is a better measure but it's affected by frames/iframes. Sites is a totally inaccurate measure since there is no way to verify that a user is in fact a user.

And if you want to be more specific, proxies (used by xDSL and Cable and AOL, usually without their knowledge) make a lot of "sites" appear to be the same site, so they aren't calculated accurately.