Google Analytics Found My Family!
Slowly building this up from a Go Daddy squatter page to a site with slightly more traffic than my Deli’s Menu Pages page, I’ve had the luxury of closely monitoring the site’s metrics and understanding how my messaging is getting out. It also allows me to understand how my network of friends and family uses the web.
The exciting tool for me is how Google reports on the geographic origin of my traffic. By looking at the map of New York I can quickly tell that my Aunt in Syracuse and my mother have visited. I know a friend in Rochester checked it out, my co-workers and several of my friends in NYC have looked at it. I have no idea who in Albany or southern NY looked, but it is cool to see that they’re watching.
A look at the whole US tells me that co-workers form other Nielsen offices in Kentucky, new co-workers in California, my aunt in Georgia, my father traveling to Miami for work (yeah, I know you checked it out Dad! So you saw the sweet ‘70s pic! Have to love Google ☺ ) and while I don’t know anyone in Seattle (greetings!) I’m happy that they’ve all looked.
Why’s this cool? As a marketer looking at this level of data is awesome. If I could write it, I’d have the site skinned to appear differently for each visitor based on where they were from. Visitors from Georgia could see a banner with myself and my aunt Shirley, Upstate New York visitors could get the current one of myself and mother, Cali visitors from Federated Media could get shots of me working hard at my desk. Now, how do I do that? Hmm….
Additional Sweet Facts -
28% of my traffic is from Twitter, which is awesome, that’s the only way I advertise and I’ve only tweeted a couple times about my ramblings.
A 51.56% Bounce Rate is great! Meaning half of my visitors do more than just look and leave, they click something. Now if I only had something to sell ;).
Average time spent is 2:34. This isn’t surprising; my aunts who probably just look at the pictures likely ignore the posts about data wonk stuff. It is still a good number however, when coupled with the bounce rate, it means I have an engaged audience which is ultimately the goal. Additionally, as a design decision I opted not to add links, outside content or any elements that would distract from the simple posts. So this decent time spent metric also is telling that my content is the focus, not RSS streams our widgets that point away from my content.
Only 4% of traffic comes from search. But the cool thing is seeing that a referring term is “Greg Hay Federated Media” meaning someone wasn’t looking for the football player that also comes up in results for “Greg Hay”
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