In Which I Become Slightly More Of A Geek

To preface this post, I'd like to mention for the sake of repeating myself that I am quite possibly one of the geekiest people you will ever meet. There are many things that I do for fun that most people would consider strange. Like researching the technical aspects of different cell phones, even though I have no interest in purchasing them. Or reading hardware manuals for an old laptop I have so I know how to take it apart and put it back together again and have it still work. Or browsing the pages of Engadget.com for interesting technology news. In addition to all of that, I have come across something in the past few months that takes me to a whole new level of geek.

When searching for ways to manage the statistics of my blog, I came across Google Analytics. It seemed like a pretty simple means of tracking this site, so I placed a string of HTML code on the front page of my blog, and let it do its thing. I had to give it a few weeks to gather enough information to report, and during that time I forgot all about it. Until today.

Let me just say that I Google Analytics is the Internet version of Geek Heaven. Upon logging in, I was presented with pie charts, line graphs, and percentages galore. I can see how many people visit my blog each day, which posts are the most popular. I know now that 75.8% of my site traffic comes from other blogs, with only 22.93 % coming from people directly entering the URL to get to me. Only 1.27% of visitors came to my blog from search engine results.

I also know that the average time people spend on the site is two minutes and forty-four seconds, and each visitor reads on average 1.54 pages. Out of all the people who come to my blog, 61.78% of them are returning visitors, while 38.22% are new visitors. Out of 157 total page visits since installing the tracking code, 147 visits were from people within the United States. The remaining ten visits were from the United Kingdom (3), the Philippines (2), and one each from Norway, Singapore, Canada, Spain, and Grenada. I average 5.06 visits per day, and the words I've written have been viewed in four different languages.

Another neat feature to GA is being able to see a comparison between my site and other sites of similar size. Basically, its a way for me to know how I stack up against others, which is good to know for the sake of my ego. I am far above the benchmark for page views, visits, and time spent on the site. I am below the benchmark for average number of pages read by visitors, and the average number of new visitors.

The post with the most individual views is the cigar-smoking-whilst-dreaming episode. Next would be the dish-vermin story. Despite this, 86.72% of visitors remain on the front page of the blog.

If you are at all curious as to what brings people to your site, and want to get all these lovely statistics for your own blog, I would highly recommend Google Analytics. All the information is presented in a very easy-to-read manner, and it really satisfies a large part of the geek in me deep down inside. I'm sure there are other programs that one could use that get the same data, but GA pretty much rules the world. Or at least my world.