Three months of gathering data
2007-08-15 | Filed under Website |
So, this website’s been back up a few months now, and I’m bored at the moment. That means it’s time to check my Google Analytics data! Specifically, I’m looking at the period between May 5 and August 5.
Highlights
Top referring site: CrimeSpot
Most disappointed referred visitors: Pure Yaoi
Most amusing keywords: “should i give out my vin number?”
Most disturbing keywords: “dead corpses of babies and toddler crime scene photos”
Geography
The site has attracted visitors from six continents. (Hah! I have penetrated South America!) I have no record of visitors from Antarctica; my Nunatak crush evidently remains unrequited. (Then again, Google defines “continents” as “Americas,” “Europe,” “Asia,” “Oceania,” and “Africa,” so who knows.) The vast majority of visitors hail from the U.S., with the U.K. and Canada a distant second and third. Visitors from Auckland are the most geographically removed from my personal location (and, almost certainly, the server’s, though I can’t remember its physical location at the moment).
On average, visitors from the Americas viewed the greatest number of pages, but visitors from Asia spent the most time on the site. Breaking it down by country, visitors from Spain and Panama viewed the most pages, and visitors from the Netherlands spent the most time of the site. By city, visitors from Mumbai averaged over 23 minutes on the site; Houston visitors averaged just under 19 minutes. Visitors from Weymouth, Lansdale, Equality, Madrid, Ogden, and Panama City averaged between 10 and 14 pages per visit.
Browsers, OS, and settings
The vast majority of visitors have their browsers set to en-us, followed by other flavors of English. Non-English browser settings did not make it out of the single digits for any particular language. I continue to find this unsurprising.
85.34% of visitors use Windows, 7.56% use Mac, and 6.56% use Linux; one visitor uses SunOS. 58.49% of visitors use IE as their browser. Firefox (on various Windows and non-Windows operating systems) is a strong second, with remaining users splitting between Safari, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla Compatible Agent, and Konqueror.
Popular pages
The blog has received the most page views, followed by the main page. Next most popular is the no-longer-extant HTML page where the Broodwich picture used to reside, followed by the Bibliography, Bio, and Library pages.
The most visited individual blog post was “20 things my children won’t understand.” Not coincidentally, this particular post has been commented upon and linked to from elsewhere.
Some pages have been removed but still generate traffic. The page where the Broodwich picture used to reside is the most popular, followed by the old “Three and a Half Lines” page. In deference to visitors who follow outside links to this site, I’ve modified the 404 page to direct them to content they might have been looking for: the aforementioned Broodwich image, three short stories, and (making use of the Wayback Machine) my Kiss Her Goodbye review.
Referrals and keywords
A lot of visitors come through CrimeSpot. Google searches were next most common, followed by direct access, then Google image searches (that’d be the Broodwich). Other referrers include sites where I comment, am included on a blogroll, or otherwise have a direct link (Whatever, Paperback Writer, Patti Abbott, Gerald So, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, etc.) Technorati, Bloglines, and Yahoo also send a certain number of visitors my way.
The Pure Yaoi visitors presumably got here via a webring page that hasn’t existed for an awfully long time. My sincere apologies to anyone who came to this site looking for hot boy-on-boy action.
“Megan Powell” (without and, less popularly, with quotes) was the top keyword search that brought visitors to this site. The Most Amusing and Most Disturbing Keywords bring up “Favors” and “Soft Soap,” respectively, in the first page or two of Google results.
The final analysis
So what does this all mean? Uh, well, I’m really bored, for one thing. Otherwise, it’s confirming a lot of General Knowledge stuff: if people link to you, you get more hits; a text-intensive site will mainly be of interest to people who read the language it’s written in; frequent updates make a site sticky. Also, people want hot boy-on-boy action.
Am I going to do anything with the wealth of knowledge that can be gleaned from Google Analytics? Well, um, probably not a whole lot.
Adjusting the 404 page a few weeks ago was my main concession to visitors looking for deleted content. I’d already reposted the short stories they were looking for; adding links to the error page just gets them to their intended destination a bit quicker. And certainly, if somebody’s trying to read one of my stories, I’d like to make it as easy as possible. The Broodwich picture’s fun, and I had no objection to posting it on the site again. I’m not prepared to recreate old blog entries—I may be bored, but there are limits—but I know there were external links to the Kiss Her Goodbye review, and Al was kind enough to send me the review copy, and the Wayback Machine had picked up the page, so I have no objection to sending any potentially interested visitors to a different site to read that content.
Otherwise, as I said, most of what it tells me is stuff I already know. If writing was my Job, and this website an Important Marketing Tool, I would probably be a tad more disciplined about things. But both are still primarily for my own entertainment; and I am pleased when others are entertained as well.
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3 Responses to “Three months of gathering data”
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Happily, I wasn’t the one to say “dead baby corpses” or “toddler crimes scenes.” Don’t ever tell us who it was.
Bwahahaha. My plan is nearly complete. Now if I can only get you to send me an email permitting me to CrimeSpot* Shred…
* I now proclaim “CrimeSpot” to be a verb.
I’m all for verbing nouns. Adverbing nouns, on the other hand, is a bad idea.
And yes, please do CrimeSpot Shred. FYI (though it doesn’t matter a whole lot the way CrimeSpot’s currently set up), Shred’s RSS feed only includes the opening couple of paragraphs for each story. I also cut some of the longer announcements a bit short.
Patti, I have no idea who made those particular searches; I don’t think Analytics lets me get quite that Big Brother, which is just fine. And based on some of the things I’ve plunked into Google for, uh, completely legitimate reasons, I’m not too disturbed.