I recently installed Google Analytics on my blog after hearing about it from a friend. It's the coolest thing ever! It hides in the background of your blog and keeps track of some great information like who visits your site (no worries. it doesn't actually tell me WHO you are.) and what city, country, etc they log in from. It also keeps track of things like how long visitors stay on the site, how many pages they view, how they get to the site (direct vs. search engine, etc), whether they are a new visitor or a returning visitor. It's just amazing to me! I don't understand the inner workings of how these things get programmed, but I thank the programmers!
Interested in a few stats? Here you go:
In 13 days, I have had 89 visits from 60 DIFFERENT visitors. That's 2.87 visits per day. They hail from countries like Kazakhstan, Australia, Ireland, Canada and the US and cities like Indianapolis (duh), Chicago (hi Jill!), the Bronx and apparently I'm very big in Hamilton, OH. (If you're a Hamiltonian, drop me a line! I'd love to hear why you're reading and what keeps you coming back!). The average visitor spends 38 seconds and checks out 1.28 pages. You all must be VERY fast readers! Most visitors have been here less than 1 day ago.
The thing I find most interesting about this is that when Google Analytics wasn't installed, I wondered if anyone ever visited, but it was just a fleeting thought. The content was based on what I wanted to talk about, what happened in my life, what I was thinking about and what's important to me. Now I somehow feel competitive about getting more visitors and getting them to stick around longer. Why is that? Is it the American sensibilities in me that tell me I need to constantly do better? Is it a desire to be heard and listened to? Food for thought for me and my therapist, I suppose.
In the meantime, since you're listening and reading, what can I do better? What do you want to hear/talk about? Do you miss hearing about more of my motorcycle adventures? Do I include too many/not enough pictures? Is there some better purpose this forum could be used for other than bragging/complaining/reporting my life and thoughts?
2 comments:
so what do you have to do to install it?
Go to Google and search for Google Analytics. It will direct you to the explanation page. All you have to do is set up an account so that it knows what blog you want to track stats on and then it give you some programming language that you just copy onto your blog. It's hidden, so it doesn't get shown when you view the blog. I just set up a new box and put it in there.
Post a Comment