PBL site records web stats for first time

The Powerline Baseball League website for the first year ever kept track of views and visits accurately.

The site had more than 21,000 visitors from 14 different countries and 123 different Canadian cities for more than 46,000 page views from Jan. 1 to Aug. 17.

“It was a decent year in terms of traffic and seemed in line with other years from the rudimentary stats we had in the past,” said PBL Web Coordinator Jason Buzzell, who installed Google Analytics last December to see how many people were coming to the site. “I would guess the traffic has grown a bit over the last couple years with the blog format, but we never knew for sure until this year how many people were hitting the site.”

The highest traffic volume day came on July 19 when news was churning about when playoffs should start as close to 1,000 pageviews were recorded.

The most viewed story was written way back in February when it was alleged that the Camrose Axemen influenced Sherwood Park to enter the NCABL rather than the PBL.

The average visitor to the site saw almost three pages on each visit and spent about two minutes during their stay.

About 15 per cent of the traffic was driven to the site through search engines. Traffic from mobile devices accounted for almost 6 per cent of the visits. Buzzell said he’s toyed with the idea of a mobile or iPhone version of the site someday.

“Again, I can only guess, but with Camrose not having a team and the hype of having a blog/comment area over, as well as the last couple year’s really controversial stories and other teams contributing more regularity, I bet we saw a little decline in traffic possibly,” Buzzell said.

“Teams are doing awesome jobs on their team site so we might have to see if people want to do a bit of a redesign or stick with this for another year with the focus still on the stories and recaps vs. stats, scores and maybe smaller updates through texting, rss feeds or even Tweeting.”

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Jason Buzzell