Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Google Analytics

I started blogging back in November of 2008, just prior to the PASS Summit in Seattle. During the summit, I discovered Google Analytics, and applied the code necessary to my blog to allow it to be tracked. Every few days I'll go out and check it out, usually after a blog post. Its interesting to see the progress and see that people are actually hitting my blog. I don't pretend to be very widely read, but I have had a few comments from kind folks that they enjoy my writings. Thats the point of why I blog. To help someone out there with my particular opinion, view, experience. When I am no longer accomplishing this small task, I will cease the activity. Sometimes the person that it truly helps is myself.

So, Google Analytics. I thought it would be interesting to show off a couple images of the dashboard, that were recently snapshotted of my blog.

This first pic is a simple timeline, with the high points being quantity of hits to the blog. Its rather up and down. As expected, most of the down times are on a weekend. However, I've had some weekends with 15-20 hits on them. Odd.
I have had a few peaks, when a particular blog post got a lot of attention. I am grateful for those periods.




The next image shows the timeline, along with some other helpful data, along with a map. This I find fascinating. I've had many hits from Europe, Africa, even 3 from Iran. A lot of hits from USA and Canada, as expected. Its interesting.




In any event, I just wanted to share this interesting information. I do think it would be interesting for others to do the same thing, and report their analytics of their blog. I find it fascinating.

1 comment:

Michael J. Swart said...

I use Google analytics as well. It's interesting to follow for sure. I also like to keep up with which search terms bring users to my site:

http://dbwhisperer.blogspot.com/2009/01/meta-post.html

Some of my colleagues know that I follow the search terms like to use that knowledge to prank me.

As an example, the phrase "tjaybelt is an evil ghostly Database Administrator" turns up exactly one hit to this blog.

Nice blog by the way, I've added it to my list of RSS feeds.