The Book Tower

For the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with Google Analytics. I grow weary of pouring over website stats as it’s part of my day job but I thought I’d give this a go. For this humble blog, I normally rely on the Textpattern logs. These are pretty good for seeing who’s coming and going, identifying spammers and chuckling at the bizarre search phrases that bring people to this site.

Google Analytics uses the page tagging method to gather its data, where you include a little bit of JavaScript on each web page you want to track, usually just before the closing body tag on your page. I only had to do this three times; my home page, the template for articles and the template for my post archives page. Not much effort required really and within two days Google Analytics was collecting stats for me.

So what do I know now that I didn’t know before?

• That the most popular search string is the tenderness of wolves, which consequently makes the article of this name my most viewed post
• The top three traffic sources to this site are Google, direct traffic and Bloglines
• 30% of my visitors use Firefox (good on ya!)
• Of my happy band of Firefox users, 10 different versions of my favourite browser are used
• 4% of visitors use Safari (hope it looks alright – I’ve never tested on Safari)
• One visitor uses a Playstation Portable
• 4% of my visitors are using dial-up
• One visitor uses Linux (good for you!)
• Of the 90% of you with Windows, 8% use Vista (join the club)
• Oh, and I have a high bounce rate. Not sure what this means yet and if I should be opening a bottle to celebrate or to drown my sorrows…

Google Analytics also provides a map overlay of visitor locations. This wasn’t as useful as I’d thought; I guess I already know the countries where some of my blogging pals reside, although it’s also revealing readerships in Ireland and the Netherlands.

It’s a cold rainy night and I’m here on my own; perfect really for Google Analytics. If you’ve anything better to do with your time though – I’d go and do that! Yeah … hang on … I’ve this week’s Heroes to watch…