About 7 months later, my friend Chris got into web design for many of the same reasons I just mentioned. He suggested I check out Google Analytics as a way of tracking traffic to my website. I hadn’t really thought of that but I loved the idea. So on February 15th, 2010 I started an Analytics account. Google Analytics is a free service that allows you to track a number of different metrics (which I will cover below) by adding a piece of java script code to each one of your pages. Examining these analytics can help you understand what is working and what is not working about your website.
The following is a tour through one year worth of analytics data (February 15, 2010 - February 15, 2011). I hope that by reading this you gain an understanding of the capabilities of Google Analytics and the importance of web metrics in general. Through writing this I hope to understand what you, the visitor, cares about seeing on this site. I haven’t looked at these data in depth before so I don’t know if there are any pages that have received 0 hits or whether there are pages that some people repeatedly visit.
Before I begin I will offer one caveat. It took me several weeks to realize that Analytics was tracking my views of the website. It offers the ability to filter out your own views and I eventually did that, however many of the initial views were of me making sure things uploaded properly. The same is true for when I moved to Maryland and realized I needed to change my IP Address in the filter. There is no way to take these views out of the data once they are in. So with that said, let’s begin.
How many people visited and how long did they stay:
783 visits, or about 2 visits per day, isn’t bad. Most people were one time visitors. As you can see in the picture below (which shows number of visitors per day over this past year) there was a period of high activity from March-May of 2010. Those spikes were when I advertised my online rummage sale on Facebook. To put this in perspective, the Bureau of Labor Statistics webpage gets several hundred thousand visits per day.
Visits: 783
Unique Visitors: 439
Return Rate: 45%
Avg. Time on Site: 1 Minute, 48 Seconds
What did people look at:
As I said earlier displaying my pictures and posting my professional information were two major reasons for wanting to establish a website. So I am glad that the Photographer pages and the Psychologist pages have received the largest portions of the traffic to the site with 551 and 433 pageviews, respectively.
Total: 2,316 pageviews
Welcome Page: 549 pageviews
Psychologist Section: 433 pageviews
Soldier Section: 316 pageviews
Photographer Section: 551 pageviews
DC Photo Project Section: 163 pageviews
Blogger Section: 346 pageviews
Online Rummage Sale Page: 202 pageviews
Contact Page: 46 pageviews
Site Map: 12 pageviews
How did people find the website:
As you can see in the pie chart most people entered the site directly, either by typing the URL into their browser or by opening a bookmark. A significant portion (39%) came from referring sites (outlined below) and a smaller portion (10%) came from searches on Google and other sites.
Top referring sites:
Facebook: 212 referrals
Group for Attitudes and Persuasion (GAP): 56 referrals
Flickr: 12 referrals
LinkedIn: 3 referrals
Top search terms that led traffic to brandonkopp.com:
Military related (e.g., deployments, kuwait, etc.): 64 searches
Kuwait related: 44 searches
Deployment related: 40 searches (NOTE: some searches combined kuwait and deployment as keywords)
Brandon related: 11 searches
Where did people log on from:
International: I’ve gotten some far reaching touches on the website from as far away as Australia and India. Many of these hits are from my jet-setting friend Chris who, possibly for my amusement, logs on to my site from the various places he visits. Thank you Chris for giving me an international presence. Another large chunk of these are referrals from the GAP homepage which, I’d imagine, is more internationally popular.
National: Perhaps unsurprisingly Ohio and Maryland are the most popular spots people have logged on from though Illinois, Texas, and North Dakota show a presence as well.
