I have to admit that using it was quite fun and it put a smile on my face everytime I studied the statistics.
Knowing that people were actually reading my blog posts or just checking it out was quite exciting.
It may probably not be an excellent tool, but it certainly does a good job.
Google Analytics collects statistics of visitors visiting a specific website. According to Wikipedia, GA is the most widely used website statistics service with 57 percent of the 10 000 most popular websites currently using it.
Back to my blog statistics, GA indicates that I’ve had 243 visitors since I started blogging in late February, but my visitor count (on my blog) indicates 356 visitors. This is probably because I only started using GA more than a week after I set up my blog.
I’ve had 627 page views since I started blogging.
The average time that visitors spent on the blog was five minutes, which is a clear indication that they read the information on my blog.
The visitors were from 12 different countries, namely the United Kingdom, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, United States of America, Bahrain, Canada, Russia and Romania among others.
Most of them (81, 4 %) used referral sites to visit the blog. About 16.5 visited the site directly and 2 percent used search engines.
Web analytic tools are very useful not only for measuring website traffic, but also for determining your return on investment (ROI) after the launch of a PR or communication campaign, and also for doing business and market research.
However, some bloggers whose only objective is too make money claim to have millions of visits a month to attract advertisers, but fail to indicate how long the visitors stayed on the site.
Another disadvantage of web analaytic tools is that they don’t indicate whether visitors read or absorbed the information on the website.
But it is still a very useful tool and I will definitely use it in future.
Toivo, I share the same sentiments, it can get quite addictive. There is something of a feeling of achievement when you see the line on the visitor numbers graph peak higher than it has done previously.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you should ‘monetise’ your blog after the assignment deadline to see how advertisers interact with bloggers. Your right about penetration and as with many PR campaigns you can put a number on circulation but not get much information about absorption.
Agree with your opinion, Google Analytics is a good tool and let us see in a pragmatic way the scope of our blog in the middle of the cyberspace.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there will be updates on these programs that are as important as the proper software of the blog, what I'm wondering is why don't they blogger or wordpress offer this tool (or at least as complete as this one) beforehand.
As you say it is very interesting to know the characteristics of the people who read it, but as well is scary to know how many footprints we are leaving since we turn on our computers! :S
I do agree with you. Google Analytic, eventhough I did not use it before but still can be said google analytic is the best way which can be used to gather view, and analyze data about your website traffic. By embedding our basic JavaScript snippet into your pages, you see which content gets the most visits, average page views and time on site for visits, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, and more. The best part: this sophisticated, full-featured web analytics package is free.
ReplyDelete