Google Analytics Update

After being extremely frustrated with Google Analytics for the past few days, and then realizing that I was mad at a service that is completely free, and I'm lucky to have it, I checked today after work and it's now working. Here's what I have to say about it. It's excellent. For something free it gives you a ton of information. I don't know if a lot of that information is useful to everybody, but to me it is. Take this graph right here, it shows me that out of all the people that visit my site ten of them have visited 9 - 14 times, eleven have visited 15 - 25 times, and seven of you have stopped by 26 - 50 times. Well, to each one of you in each category, thank you for coming back. I know it's been a bit awkward in the last while, with me changing things around, sending all of my personal stuff to a new blog, and then drastically changing the look of this blog (which I'm totally unhappy with, by the way, and will be changing again soon).

I think what I'm getting at with this post is reflected in my post from last night on my personal blog, here. I'm trying to make this experience better for myself and for people who visit, and hopefully more will visit in the future. If they don't, I'm okay with that, too. So, I'm going to ask a favour. I'd like some feedback on the site. What do you like, if anything, and what don't you like? Is there something to add? Is there something that really bugs you that needs to go? Lay it on me. I'm a big boy, I can take it. You can either leave a comment on this post, or email me at kaievan@gmail.com. People say constructive criticism is helpful. Well, I think even if it isn't constructive, it still gives me insight into what's going on.




This next graph tells me that of the 100 or so unique visitors to / <BEGIN EDIT> sorry, I just realized that not everyone would know that / meant 'root' or the homepage <END EDIT> since installing Analytics, about half were returning visitors, and the other half were new. Now, the keywords used through Google to get to my site, and the entrance and exit points, both tell me that about 30 of those visitors were searching for a specific topic (the Einstein Robot was popular), but the others have been coming back. Each one of the people that do come back view about 1.67 pages. I know that's because the new material is on the front page, and the other 0.67 pages are comments.

So what does all this mean? Well, it means that I can monitor the activity on my blog, fine tune it when I see spikes in readership, and rip out the stuff that's not interesting to people. I like it. If you haven't signed up for Google Analytics, do so now. It's interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes.