Why is the visitor map presented as multiple pages?

[blogannath]

Hi,

This is really mystifying to me, but when I go to Recent Visitor Map in my dashboard, I see a map with the locations of some of my last 500 visitors. But then I am able to click on page 2, page 3 etc., at the bottom of the page to map other visitors. All I can think is, what the ....? The whole point of the map is to see the full geographical reach of my website at one glance (at least the full geographical reach as represented by my last 500 visitors). Why split it into multiple pages? What determines whether the map is presented as one map or multiple maps? The whole point of that screen is completely negated by this behavior, so I hope it is some sort of bug that will get corrected.

[blogannath]

So, nobody knows anything about this or has any opinion about this?

[Car Guy]

Well if you have the basic free account you could have a few hundred pins on the map. Even many more if you have 10,000 page loads!

The choice would be to have pins on pins, or to have more than one page. Can you imagine a single map with 2,000 pins on it?

That would be my guess.

[blogannath]

OK, that makes sense, but can the limit on the number of pins be at least 500 so that a basic free user can see his entire log on one page? Also, the number of pins on a map does not seem to be constant. At one point in the not too distant past, my visitor map was on one page. Now it is on 3 pages. But my log file did not grow or shrink during this time period (it has been at 500 entries since at least july 4th of 2009).

[Car Guy]

Well the number of pins on the map will change as the "visitors" are identified by IP.

So if I did a campaign in a particular city and I viewed the map I could expect to see several hundred pins on one tiny spot on the map? I think that would even be to much overlapping of pins and would be a pain to deal with when clicking on pins. Also don't forget that even though it may be a unique visitor, you may have many using the same ISP and it's possible that many or all could be placed in the same exact location on the map. For example, AOL uses are "all" from Reston Virginia, so you would have all your "AOL" pins piled on top of each other.

I don't know if having 500 pins on one map is the best solution.

[blogannath]

I think it should be a user option whether they want to see the visitors on one page or multiple pages. I can choose to look at 6 months worth of daily statistics on my summary page even though it is completely unreadable. To make it readable, I then can reduce the period to one month or one week or whatever. Just because it would be unreadable statcounter does not prevent me from trying to put up any number of days on the summary graph.

In the same way, I should be able to map all my visitors on one page even if the map becomes very crowded. If I wanted to then pinpoint individual visitors I can choose to split my map to 10 pages, or 20 pages or whatever makes the most sense to me. In any case, since google allows one to zoom in and out of the map to any extent one needs, the whole point is completely moot as far as I am concerned. If two pins are indistinguishable from each other when viewed in the context of the whole world, then they would become distinguishable at some level of zoom-in as long as they are not right on top of each other (like two AOL users). And if they are right on top of each other, they can not be separated anyways whether you zoom in or out. Is the splitting of the map into multiple pages to separate such indistinguishable pinpoints by putting them on different pages? For instance, if I have 50 AOL visitors in my log, all from Reston, VA, will my visitor map then be presented as 50 pages so that I can distinguish between all of these individual visitors?

Which brings up my next gripe: statcounter removed the zoom option from the google map! Why oh why?! Somebody simply dropped the ball thinking through this useful feature, crippling it almost to the point of uselessness . . .

[Car Guy]

Originally Posted by blogannath

For instance, if I have 50 AOL visitors in my log, all from Reston, VA, will my visitor map then be presented as 50 pages so that I can distinguish between all of these individual visitors?

Don't know, I rarely get AOL visitors.

Originally Posted by blogannath

Which brings up my next gripe: statcounter removed the zoom option from the google map! Why oh why?! Somebody simply dropped the ball thinking through this useful feature, crippling it almost to the point of uselessness . . .

Works for me! Double click.

[blogannath]

Ah, very interesting. I have never double-clicked on a map to zoom in! And is there a special trick for zooming out too or do I have to click on something else and then click on visitor map again to have it zoomed all the way out?

Given that the map actually does have zooming capability (at least the ability to zoom in), I don't see any reason whatsoever to present the visitor map in multiple pages. I rest my case . . .

[webado]

It would need more memory to store information on 500 hits in order to show them all on a single page.

[blogannath]

Ah, I see. Interesting. Do you happen to know how many locations are actually presented on each page of the map right now? And if the map is presented in 3 pages (as it is currently for me), does that mean that the 1st and 2nd pages have the maximum number of pins the memory limitation will allow with the rest spilling over to the 3rd page? Thank you.