Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an amazing tool. For the price of adding a small bit of embed code to your blog you can glean an amazing amount of insight into the makeup and behavior of your visitors. For example, using data gathered over the last 30 days I was able to discover the following about people who end up at my blog:
- The vast majority of hits to my site came from locations within the USA. However it also seems as though I have a small but loyal fan club from Barcelona, Spain who have visited the site 205 times during the last month.
- The search term “craig kapp girlfriend” was used to find my site 6 times in the last week. The computer that originated the request lives somewhere in Brooklyn, NY, and this individual stayed on my site for an average of 4:22 minutes, much longer than the average visit over that time (2.18 minutes.) I have no idea who this person is!
- A surprising amount of traffic directed to my site is focused on finding information about “kid friendly virtual worlds.”
In the interest of further mining this rich set of data I have constructed a flash-based inspector that parses individual search terms used in locating my blog. The program breaks down search terms into individual words and ranks them by frequency of use through a dynamically generated bar chart. Mousing over a bar will display all search variations that use that particular word (i.e. “craig” has been used in the search terms “craig kapp,” “craig kapp itp” and “sex chat rooms blog.craigkapp.com” – yikes! Let’s hope that last one was a spambot …
The tool is currently running off a snapshot of last month’s data, but I’d like to hook it up to a live feed for up to the minute analysis. Feel free to check it out.
Tags: flash, google analytics