If you are like me, you love to crunch numbers and analyze the world from as many different angles as possible. It's pretty easy to go metrics crazy with your blog using Google Analytics. There is a very straightforward How-to blog post here. I set it up last week, and it took a few hours for Google Analytics to recognize my blog and a few more days to get meaningful data about my blog.
What did I learn?
9 unique visitors have visited my blog in the past week, and they stayed for an average of 2 minutes and 22 seconds. The most popular browser was the BlackBerry browser (that's me checking repeatedly for comments on my latest post from the Orlando airport!) and the most popular post so far was last week's post about signaling.
How could I use Analytics to help me?
If I were trying to monetize my blog, I could experiment with different methods to drive traffic (and thus increase ad revenue) to my site via social networking and search engine optimization. I could use the data to figure out where people were navigating to, and were there were leaving my site to better understand what people are interested in.
Let's give it a try...
My approach to "promoting" my blog so far this term has been sort of akin to the "build it and they will come" way of thinking. This time, I will post a notice to the Google Groups site to see what happens. Look for results in the comments section later this week... Thanks for playing!
One of the coolest things about Google Analytics is geo-location. You can see where folks are coming from and that is pretty interesting. The only caveat is that it isn't always accurate. From work for example, I look like I'm coming from Texas. It has to do with ISP backbones, routing, etc.
ReplyDeleteNonetheless, this has to be one of the most impressive (and free!) tools out there.
Google is giving more and more great useful tools for many different purposes. Makes me wonder how is the future competition for e-business firms who offer similar services but charge the user for the use of the service. It's tough to compete with something free.
ReplyDeleteThis is cool app but I am wonder if it can record the page display time or time taken to display data on a web page. Basically whether it can report performance metrics. I know there some paid applications that can do it but was wondering if Google Analytics can do it for free...:-). And as mentioned by Aaron if it can track the user location then one can easily get performance metrics for your website from various locations in US and abroad.
ReplyDeleteThanks Ben for blogging about this interesting and impressive app.
Thanks for the comments everyone!
ReplyDelete@Aaron - Interesting about geo-location not necessarily giving your physical browsing location. Good to know...somewhat relatedly, I noticed that when I send a tweet from the CLU campus it says "Downtown Thousand Oaks". I didn't know T.O. had a downtown...
@Fenny - great question. Imagine how scary that would be if you had a business and then Google came along and offered the same (or better) service for free. Might make your next VC pitch a tough one.
@Unmesh - I just checked and couldn't find anything about site performance or speed, though I can't image it will be long...
This is so cool, I love it, gonna be veryhelp to me I think!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great tool Ben. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete