Tracking Stats

[PriestOfIshtar]

I am super nerdy by nature, so of course I am tracking stats in a spreadsheet.

I know it has almost no value or purpose other than pretty lines and colors.

Who's down this rabbit hole with me?

 

[8letters]

You're using the "Download Story Stats" button on your Works page, right? Makes tracking stats so much easier.

 

[PriestOfIshtar]

You're using the "Download Story Stats" button on your Works page, right? Makes tracking stats so much easier.

Well, sort of.

I use that & then cut and paste the key rows into a google spreadsheet I use to color code values, compute additional trends, add graphs, and break activity down by weekly values (rather than just by story).

 

[SimonDoom]

I track stats. I hit the Download Story Stats icon a few times a week, and input the data from the columns into an Excel worksheet that I've maintained for about four years.

 

[TadOverdon]

I like it when a chapter ranks 4.5 or higher, and when my "read" numbers continue to grow. That's as involved as I get.

Right now, just under half of what I've posted is <ahem> "hot."

 

[PennameWombat]

Well, sort of.

I use that & then cut and paste the key rows into a google spreadsheet I use to color code values, compute additional trends, add graphs, and break activity down by weekly values (rather than just by story).

I use Libre Office spreadsheets, can import/export those in/out of Google Sheets.

I track stats. I hit the Download Story Stats icon a few times a week, and input the data from the columns into an Excel worksheet that I've maintained for about four years.

This but Libre Office spreadsheet. And I only do it every couple of weeks unless I have a contest entry, then I do it a bit more regularly. Unless I see something in my notifications or Works view that seems weird. Like a story losing 50% of its votes few days ago...

But I’m not interested in doing deep analysis. My main interest is tracking the differences between traffic around contest entries and if that spreads across my other stories and then non-contest times (or contests I don’t enter.) But it’s really not an obsession with me.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Yep. I am a data wonk.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

I did have a spreadsheet but wanted to add a list of my characters for reference purposes so I switched to an Access database.

Has all my stats on one page and a link to a summary of each story with the cast.

Complete overkill but great fun!

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I've got few enough stories and votes that I can spot changes just by looking. The discrepancies between parts of the site over the last month have been interesting. I published a quick April Fool story which got to around 4.3 by the end of the contest then rose to a steady 4.72+/-0.02.

Then the March prizes were announced and my story was listed as top in its category. Click through and it's a steady 4.2 with 60% of the viewers. I guessed it was troll's and critics downvoting any story that gets attention (like my prizewinning Valentine's story going from 4.9+ to 4.45 within hours, settling at 4.57 for the last month) Yet if I look at the new story via my own login, it's 4.72.

It's been this >0.5 discrepancy for over a week, yet the numbers of viewers in both parts of the site (9k vs 13k) are still rising by around 100 a day.

Fascinating data from a systems analyst POV. For an author it simply confirms a bunch of people did like it even if a bunch of others didn't, which is fine.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I did have a spreadsheet but wanted to add a list of my characters for reference purposes so I switched to an Access database.

Has all my stats on one page and a link to a summary of each story with the cast.

Complete overkill but great fun!

Someone still uses Access? Wow!

 

[TadOverdon]

Someone still uses Access? Wow!

Sure. If you've got a license for MS Office, you tend to use...okay, I don't use Powerpoint.

 

[PennameWombat]

Sure. If you've got a license for MS Office, you tend to use...okay, I don't use Powerpoint.

No license which is why I use Libre Office and Google Docs Well, at home and for Lit. I use MS Office for work but I don’t let any of my Lit stories onto that laptop

 

[PriestOfIshtar]

love to see the other data junkies here! yay!

but... access... omg... i love the dedication and am appalled at the tech...

(my progression was mysql -> postgres -> aws cloud dbs of various sorts)

 

[SyleusSnow]

Just for fun I've started downloaded my stats on the same day once every month and importing in LibreOffice spreadsheets and then into LibreOffice Base (and you if think Access is bad... )

At least it's in a database of some kind and can be queried to make pretty graphs and stats panels. Which I'll get around to creating Real Soon Now.

 

[TadOverdon]

No license which is why I use Libre Office and Google Docs Well, at home and for Lit. I use MS Office for work but I don’t let any of my Lit stories onto that laptop

My partner says he had a job in college and had access to the Internet there and he used to upload Overdon stuff to the asstr newsgroup from his work computer. This would have been in the 90s or just around the turn of the century. He was clueless.

A complaint came up with something else he'd done, like written something angry on a web petition or something and the owner of the page took his IP and complained to his department.

Which was probably lucky for him. Because the network security dude did a cursory search of his machine's activity regarding that one site, rapped him on the knuckles and that was the end of it. But that was enough to get P's attention about how the network was monitored, and he never did porn at work again. LOL

 

[Rustyoznail]

Just for fun I've started downloaded my stats on the same day once every month and importing in LibreOffice spreadsheets and then into LibreOffice Base (and you if think Access is bad... )

At least it's in a database of some kind and can be queried to make pretty graphs and stats panels. Which I'll get around to creating Real Soon Now.

If you want to torture yourself, I have Paradox on a set of 3 1/2” floppy’s somewhere.

 

[SyleusSnow]

If you want to torture yourself, I have Paradox on a set of 3 1/2” floppy’s somewhere.

Heh. Never used Paradox, but pretty sure I have dBase III on 5.25" somewhere.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

Someone still uses Access? Wow!

Been through Dbase, Paradox and a few others I've long forgotten.

Still make a few shillings out of work on dear old Access here and there and this old dog is definitely too old to teach new tricks!

 

[PennameWombat]

Been through Dbase, Paradox and a few others I've long forgotten.

Still make a few shillings out of work on dear old Access here and there and this old dog is definitely too old to teach new tricks!

I might drop the Geek Pride story I’m writing and just collect this thread and submit it

The Querying: A Study in Rolled Back Transactions

“Sybase,” he moaned, “Lord Sybase, why hast thou forsaken me?”

“Third normal form, bitch,” the deep voice boomed from the sky, “you failed My test.”

I use an Access DB at work for tracking equipment that we loan out for testing and customer trials and such. Also use the whole MS Office suite there but yeah, none of that touches Lit

At home I have PostgreSQL linked to the same on AWS for redundancy and remote access. But I’ve never yet put my Lit stats in that.

I like and use Libre Office but when I looked once at Base... well, no.

 

[NotWise]

I've been tracking my stories since late 2015. I had the specific goal of understanding the distribution of votes on my stories. I update my LibreOffice spreadsheets as soon as a see a new vote cast, otherwise I often don't know what votes are aggregated or netted out with sweeps. With a new story that can be very time-consuming.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I've been tracking my stories since late 2015. I had the specific goal of understanding the distribution of votes on my stories. .

This. When I started writing here, I spent a lot of time experimenting, posting in different genres. I wanted to be able to see how different things were being received by the readers. Still at it.

 

[PriestOfIshtar]

Those of you who have been taking a studied approach to collecting stats over a period of years... would you be willing to share any data or aggregate data? I am super curious what your conclusions are.

Obviously, for any single author, it would be impossible to draw universal conclusions, but I am still curious!

 

[NotWise]

Those of you who have been taking a studied approach to collecting stats over a period of years... would you be willing to share any data or aggregate data? I am super curious what your conclusions are.

Obviously, for any single author, it would be impossible to draw universal conclusions, but I am still curious!

I think I have two aggregate conclusions.

From monitoring the number of views my stories get, the median views/day/story doesn't vary much from day-to-day. That small variation is systematic, with slightly lower reading rates late in the week and higher reading rates early in the week. The pattern for the average views/day/story is different, because the average is strongly influenced by the high reading rates on new stories.

From constructing the voting distribution on my stories, a simple model is that the number of votes in one category is a factor multiplied by the number of votes in the next higher category. For instance if you have eight 5* votes and a factor is 0.5, for instance, then you will have about four 4* votes, two 3* votes and one 2* vote.

In that example your score would be 4.27. You can back-calculate the factor from the score without knowing any vote counts, but it isn't a simple task.

The pattern works better on stories after troll votes are swept, and the pattern may not be descriptive for other people.

 

[Sonatatre]

I started to keep track on some stats in October 2019 and I check it once per month.

I do not use the stats download because I struggle to get it to work and just find it easier to do a run down on some stats myself. I think the reason I started is that I only post 2-4 stories per year and wanted to see if my stories get any attention during my down periods.

Right now I am getting about 20k new views in total per month on my 20 stories. Last month 315 of them voted. Number of new followers vary a lot and has been between 10-50 over the last months.

In March I had my biggest wave of down votes since i started to keep track. I have seen some in the past, but this time 19 out of 20 stories dropped, and they even made sure that the stories with over 1k votes on them dropped 0.2-0.3 in average score. They must have had a lot of accounts to make that happen, showing a premendous dedication to lowering my average score.

 

[Bramblethorn]

In March I had my biggest wave of down votes since i started to keep track. I have seen some in the past, but this time 19 out of 20 stories dropped, and they even made sure that the stories with over 1k votes on them dropped 0.2-0.3 in average score. They must have had a lot of accounts to make that happen, showing a premendous dedication to lowering my average score.

A lot of authors saw their scores drop in March - seems to have been an issue with the method the site uses to clean up bogus voting, getting over-enthusiastic and culling a lot of legit votes.