An Early Look at Site Stats
A couple of days ago my programmer got the Google Analytics code installed on this site which will enable me to obtain excellent statistics on not just the number of page views but how many “absolute unique visitors” I have.
As an example, over these first 2+ days the site has had 1,404 visits generating 2,221 page views. Of the 1,404 visits, 952 were unique visitors so the remaining visits were return visitors.
Firefox is the top browser of choice overall and among Windows users. For those of you using IE. Stop. It is a horrible browser. This site and others looks & functions better from Firefox, Safari, Chrome or any other browser.
Sixty-percent of the traffic came direct with twenty-two percent from search engines and the balance as referrals from other sites. I’ve been noticing from my old stats tracking system that nearly every day someone searches for my site by typing in ‘urban review stl.’ I guess I fail to understand why you’d do a search engine search when you know the name?
Speaking of search engines, 80% of the search traffic is from Google, 15% from Yahoo and the remaining 5% divided up among others like AOL and MSN.
Again, this is only after a couple of days. After a few weeks, months and years I’ll have a much better set of data on the readership. After the March primary election I’ll do a new post on this topic.
Just wondering, do your statistics also show how many subscribe via RSS?
Interesting. I never type the url, I usually do a search because google doesn’t care if I have a typo.
If you want to know how many people have subscribed to your RSS feed, use Feedburner:
http://www.feedburner.com/
Echoing Ryan’s endorsement of Feedburner. Great tool for keeping count of subscribers, knowing how many of them use a particular feedreader or aggregator, knowing which posts are more popular than others, and adding functionality (and ads) to your feed. Since you use Analytics, you should find Feedburner ready for use in your Google account (as Google acquired Feedburner last year).
I also use RSS so I won’t show up unless I go to the site to leave a comment… I use Seamonkey on Linux. 2048×1152 screen size, and a big THANK YOU for making a site that conforms to the desires (or needs) of the reader. So many web pages have fixed-width design and pixel-sized fonts. Dynamic layout and relative font sizes are the way to go.
Yikes…I’ve long had Google Analytics installed. Your two day total trumps my average month (700 or so unique visitors, 1,100 total).
I was thinking of dropping the blogspot from my name, improving my layout, and, of course, improving my content. That three-pronged approach might get me to push Urban Review STL off the St. Louis blogosphere map.
LOL. I am totally kidding.
^
I’d like to do the same thing to my blog, although I’m not sure how to go about doing that.
First, I need to figure out how to customize the blogspot template – I’m thinking my blog needs to be more visually interesting.
I second that! Firefox has all the functionality and stability I want. Chrome is quite slick, however.