Friday, February 11, 2011

The side effects of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very useful tool that allows webmasters to find out what's really going on with their websites. For instance: How many people are visiting your blog? Where do they come from? Are they reading it or rather skipping it? How long do they stay in your webpage?

A couple of weeks ago I went to a job interview which required me to know a bit of web analytics, so I decided to test Google Analytics and see what the fuzz is about (or was, since it's no longer a new tool and I am not sure if there's something better out there). So.. I opened a Google Analytics account, copied a piece of tracking code to my blog.. and believe it or not, people actually visit my blog!

Well, it's definitely not the most visited page on the web (10 visits per day during the last week, and 90% of the visitors never click on a link), but... its much more visited than I thought :)

Thanks to Google Analytics I know, for instance, that 38% of my visitors come from the US (see map below), and that British are more likely to keep reading it, rather than jumping to another webpage.

This is, truth be told, amazing news. I haven't written here anything at all for almost a year, and yet people still visit it.. now imagine: what if I actually wrote something? Can I improve traffic? An interesting experiment...

9 comments:

sparkle kitten said...

I just started my blog and I am now a total loser bc I check the amalytics all the time waiting to see if anyone actually looked at it :)

Joanne said...

AWWW do keep writing! people will definitely visit and keep visiting! Good luck. Blessings, Joanne

fay_crystal said...

I just have a question, since you seem like another guru, would you give this information aout for free or would you charge? I just had to ask because I can understand very much that people need to make a buck, but whatever happend to people just helping people and sharing there ideas? it's just sad. What are your views on people saying things are free until your done reading and at the very end they want money?

Anonymous said...

Hey Marcelo,
es ging mir ebenso wie dir bezüglich des Schreibens in anderer Sprache. Als ich meinen Blog (alles noch in der Ausprobierphase) eröffnete, sah ich, dass fast alle Blogs nicht Deutsch sind. Schade, war doch auf Dauer auch der Austausch über aktuelle Themen geplant. Englisch schreiben möcht eich aufgrund eventuell folgender eigener Gedichte nicht.
Gruß,
Kx.

Marcelo said...

Hi Kx... da hast du Recht, man sollte sein Blog in der Sprache schreiben, die man am besten beherrscht... das wäre für mich Spanisch :) Aber ich finde es gut, dass du über die Verbreitung von Deutschen Blogs kämpfst!

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thats a very great piece..

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Anonymous said...

Very informative blog. Google analytics is a web service offered by google that tracks and reports website traffic. Here I observed the advantages of these analytics. Thanks for sharing. Apart from this article, I learned about hammerhead shark which is the largest of all hammerhead species.