What Our Counter Tells Us

If it works, our counter collects some data on the last 100 visitors, including:
IP Address, ISP, city, state and country;
Date and time of visit, visit length, page views *;
Referring site; if the site was a search engine, the words you used;
Entry page and Exit page.
Sometimes it just says "Unknown".

* Visit vs. Page View: If you come in and look at 4 different pages, that counts as one visit and four page views. If you do the same tomorrow, that's another visit and four more page views.

Our counter doesn't collect your e-mail address or your name. We average 25 - 40 visitors a day, and, again, it only shows the data for the last 100 visits, so the information evaporates into the ether after four days at the most.

Our webmaster looks at the data from the counter as a reporting tool. He reports average visits per day, by month, to the Board of Trustees. He looks at the data once in a while for his own amusement, especially the data that shows how people found us. We once had a visitor who found us through Google with the words:

"Free pitchers from the Bible for kids to color".

She spelled "pictures" the way she pronounced it and hit the line on our Children's page that says "Not all joggers run a marathon and not all little league pitchers go on to play in the majors". We used to come up second in Google for the three words "Modesto Adult Video". Modesto Junior College came up first. We both have video courses in our Adult Education catalogs. MJC's catalog is bigger.

If you are really interested, click on our counter, wait for it to come up, click on "Browser share" at the bottom, wait to see the pie chart, then click on any of the reports on the left. "Referrals" and "Details" are the most telling.

(This is a subsidiary page to our Privacy Policy.)