Google Analytics: A few days on

As I mentioned a few days ago, I recently started tracking usage on Montifax with Google Analytics. While we are only about two weeks into the tracking there are a few trends that seem to be developing.

Most notably, it seems that our users are, as expected, coming largely from regions inhabited by people we know. This means that St. John's, Halifax, and Montreal are three of the world-wide hotbeds of readership, while a few other North American cities have also shown up on lists of locations of people checking the site. As time goes on we seem to be getting the occasional hit from other countries and other parts of Canada and the US. I think that I was most surprised to see China, Turkey, and Indonesia on the list of countries that have had Montifax related activity from inside their borders. As exciting as it is to get a new country, these still don't represent a large portion of overall readership/visitors (as I wouldn't want to assume that just because one visits a blog that they actually read the content).

Another trend seems to be developing in terms of daily visitors. Though we had one day with only about two, a more typical days see anywhere from 7 to 13 people check the site. While not staggering by any means, it does seem to be regular (and more volume that I can generate by checking on three different computers).

A more surprising trend is that on most days one or two people find Montifax through web searches (and on a few days up to three people found us Montifax this way). While most find us through Google, a few have found us through Yahoo (but those seem to be the only search engines people have used to find us). The range of search terms used to find us is quite impressive. Not only have people been found us when searching for the Goobies Moose, but also when searching with the following search strings: 'she served us topless,' 'market research coffee table books,' not wearing underwear,' and 'newfoundland beer consumption.'

While it seems that part of the point of Google Analytics is to help webmasters/administrators increase traffic we haven't seemed to be able to use the service to achieve such ends. Mainly access to the service has allowed us (more specifically me) to see how people are accessing the site and generally how many readers we get on a daily basis. While most of this isn't all that important or useful I have enjoyed having the information. Furthermore, this gives me something else on the web to check on a daily basis when I really can't find some more useful way of using my time.