Google Analytics

It’s a month since I put a visitor counter on this blog and I’m quite amazed at the number of visitors it has shown up. Over 1890 as I write this... I thought the accuracy must be questionable and since then I have set up Google Analytics (on 27th November) and the average number of visitors per day is about 40 with a peak of 60 (December 1st) and a low of 21 (December 6th). In two weeks there were 645 visits from 482 different people. So over the month there were probably about 1300 rather than 1890.

One of the more strange statistics was the bounce rate. It told me how to decrease my bounce rate and various other things but it didn’t say anywhere what a ‘bounce rate’ was. Eventually I put ‘define: bounce rate’ in Google search engine and discovered it was the number of people who came into a site at one page and left without visiting other pages on the site. Not really an issue on a blog I would have thought. Funnily enough the lowest ‘bounce rate’ came from four Italian visitors who explored the site in depth and at length. Fascinating.

Much more interesting and rewarding were the statistics about loyalty with about 16% of visitors coming back every day and a further 10% coming back two or more times. The average time spent on the site was 1 minute 2 seconds. If you assume a number of visitors took about ten seconds to asses that the site was not for them, the average for the rest was probably just about time to read the normal daily entry.

During the fortnight the visitors came mainly from the UK (310) and the USA (163) with the rest scattered across another 48 countries – principally New Zealand (28, of which 14 would presumably have been GB), Canada, Australia and France. A number of countries accounted for just one call – I hope the Egyptian, Brazilian, Taiwanese, Moroccan, Turkish and others enjoyed their visit! The bulk of Africa, the Middle East, western South America and Greenland were the only big gaps in the visitors map thought there were actually two visitors from Chile and two from South Africa.

All in all it has been a fascinating exercise and I hope folk continue to find my Rambles from my Chair interesting enough to come back...