We've removed the direct in-database tracking of guide visits some years back already, however based on pages called we can still see trends on which guides are the most searched after this year.
Visitor numbers
Absolute visitor numbers are a bit difficult to gather unfortunately. I'll split these numbers up based on their sources.
For one we have since several years now a Piwik/Matomo tracking on the website. However due to cookie policies and additionally modern browsers own do-not-track-me features, which the Matomo tracking respects, this tracking only registers a fraction of visits on the website.
The second tracking we have is the webservers internal logfiles, which register every page call. It does not however recognize "coming back visitors" as such. If two page calls from the same user are 30 minutes apart, they get registered as a new visit.
So much for the techniques behind the tracking, let's talk some numbers.
Matomo tells me that in 2022 we had over 123k visits on the website. These numbers have been going down from 2021 (125k), 2020 (148k) and 2019 (301k). Keep in mind though that with more strict browser privacy policies, Matomo might not see all visits by default.
Now the internal server logfiles show a little bit bigger numbers. According to them in 2022 we had over 1.5 million visits. There's a very interesting surge in visits starting with July 2022 where we went from an average of 80k visits per month to 190k, which continues throughout December.
This trend in rising numbers also reflects in the Matomo tracking, with a surge in July 2022.
Who's visiting?
Let's talk some about who's visiting this website.
The majority of visitors come from Europe (58 %) and North America (34 %). Based on country, first place goes to the USA (31.5 %), followed by the UK (10.3 %), Norway (9.4 %), Sweden (5.4 %) and Germany (5.3 %).
These numbers also get backed up by the Google Search Console, which just registers things happening on the Google Search Results in regards to our website. There the most impressions and clicks also come from the USA, followed by the UK, then Norway, Germany and Sweden.
The majority of visitors use a Full HD resolution screen (42.6 %), followed by QDH (9.3 %), and then come a variety of odd laptop and mobile device resolutions.
The vast majority visits using Chrome as browser and Windows 10 as OS (76.9 %), followed by Android OS (9.6 %).
When are you visiting?
For this I had a look at the Google Search Console and I can very confidently that a majority of players are playing and looking at our guides on weekends. Every saturday/sunday there's a high peak in impressions and clicks.
Hot Topics
The most interest in guides goes to the Classic AO guides (31.7 %), followed by Shadowlands (24.4 %), Alien Invasion (8.4 %), then Legacy of the Xan, Lost Eden and lastly Notum Wars.
The classic raids are where most visitors come looking for guides, namely the Condemned Subway, followed by the Temple of Three Winds, the Inner Sanctum Raid and the Dust Brigade.
Those also show in the Google search words, where the top searched topics include "subway", "inner sanctum" and "totw".
Guides regarding the Dust Brigade quests have been the most search after using our internal search engine.
And lastly for some more numbers on how we're doing on Google in general. We've had 1.39 million impressions in search results, with 224k clicks leading from those impressions to our site.
All of this tells me that despite the age of this game, it still has an active and interested community.
Also since we started accepting Paypal donations to support this website with it's hosting, we've reached the yearly goal every year, thanks to you generous people.
This year we've gotten 138 € in total (excluding Paypal fees), which covers the set goal of 120 € per year. A big thank you to everyone who donated!
In the name of the AOU team I'd like to thank everyone who comes visiting, interacting and supporting this website and the community around it, as well as the game itself.
I wish you a Happy New Year and hope you'll come by again in 2023!
Cheers,
Khuri
