Google Analytics
Hot on the hills of AWStats, I have added Google Analytics tracking code to each page on this site. With small hiccup - I added it to blog pages only, by mistake. Realized four days later. Dumb
Although Dejan told me all the good stuff about it, I did not bother to try it out until few days ago. Server-side log analysis is still needed since my feeds can’t be tracked with GA code. For other pages though, the amount of tracking options GA gives is amazing. There are some very interesting things I picked up there.
One of the best visual goodies is this geo-map overlay display. It’s one thing to look at the list of countries from where people are coming, quite another to see it so nicely displayed. I actually hovered over each of those dots to take a look and smiled all the way.
The referring sources chart is in line with the AWStats findings. Majority of visits are coming from Google, while 18% are direct opening, which could be counted as loyal visitors that check my blog from time to time. Thank you. :) The most obvious problem I have with all these Google-originating visits becomes apparent when looking at this chart:
Huge majority of visits is of one-page-only type. People find what they need and move on. Nothing unusual though, but when I thought about this I realized that I did not really offer any incentive to keep them a while. Top navigation is basically the only thing that connects my blog posts.
Enter related posts feature, which is located just below each post, driven by the Related entries plugin. It does the matching over post titles or hidden keywords inside the blog content. Since I’m lazy to add the keywords, this will have the added benefit of forcing me to think of better post titles.
Another very interesting plugin from the same author is Related entries for 404 page. One of the things I spotted is that my 404 page is completely useless. I have recoded it yesterday to better handle incoming URLs and implemented related posts as well, which could prove to be the most useful of all additions. We’ll see how it goes.
One surprising observation is that only 7% of visitors are using modem connections! Wow. I thought it’s much higher.
This was simply confirming what I already felt. 800x600 is dead, it’s more than safe to code for 1000px. Or better yet, use em-based layout and use larger font sizes. For instance, my current layout is 55em wide and uses 100% of the user’s default text size. This nicely fits into 1000px width.