Last night the dude asked me what "google analytics" was. So I was showing him the stats on this blog. In the last 6 months, someone has visited from every state in the U.S. (California is the top, New York second, then PA) and a surprising number (to him) of countries from all over the globe. We were looking to see if anyone visited from Durham where the dude grew up (no, but Darlington, Newcastle, and Sunderland residents stop by). Then we were looking at N.H. where I grew up. People, I have what can only be described as a HUGE following in West Lebanon, N.H. More people visit from West Leb (pop 12,000) than Los Angeles (Glendale even). I'm thinking Hanover doesn't show up on the map, and that a handful of students or staff or faculty at Dartmouth are reading but using different computers and showing up as unique visitors. Or maybe I'm going to go to West Lebanon and be honored as the conquering hero (maybe you remember me as the girl who handed out Kudos bars at the grocery store when they were first introduced). Or maybe a bunch of kids at Kimball Union are just really, really bored. So, if you are visiting from West Lebanon or the surrounding community, do tell! Is my URL on the bathroom wall at Four Aces Diner?
The dude is also utterly convinced that my visitors from places like Bulgaria and Ghana* and Egypt are expats. So, a poll which is up there ^^^^. I can't make blogger put it down here. Also, I haven’t researched this so maybe I could but I am lazy today with the rain.
My MIL arrives today for 16 days. Don't forget I adore her. It might be rude to blog the whole time she's here. I will try to keep you up to date on the finger—doctor's appointment Monday.
Edited: *Oops, they speak English (officially) in Ghana. So change that to Brasil.
8 comments:
It's interesting to see the different places that visit my blog. I've had visitors from all over, but the ones that surprised me were hits from Iraq and Iran.
I currently use StatCounter, but I've heard about Google Analytics several times this week...I may have to go check it out.
Although you can be relatively sure of which country someone's coming from, it's not always accurate in the detail. It always says I'm visiting sites from Glasgow, although that city is nearly 100 miles from here
I always come out on the maps as being from a different part of the Netherlands than where I actually live. Some sort of hosting thing or something to do with our Internet provider, I suppose.
I would say that a goodly number of your Brazilian visitors are probably Brazilian. English is taught there as a second language starting at an early age -- it is the way they communicate with most of the rest of the world.
If you look at the list of bloggers for the Brides Tree SAL, you can find a fair number of Brazilian bloggers, many of whom blog in English.
From one who was once an "expat" in Brazil.
I hate to be a spoil sport, but I assume that most foreign visitors don't speak English at all (and don't read your blog). For example, in the last year I have had exactly one visitor from Vermont (Woodstock). They visited one page and stayed 00:00:00 for a bounce rate of 100%. They may have landed on my site, but they certainly weren't interested enough to stay for even a second. Maybe they were doing a random search on blogger. The same is true for countries like Indonesia (Jakarta). 2 visits, 1 page per visit, 100% bounce rate. At least in Norway I got 7 visits. No lookers from Drammen and Horten, but at least someone in Oslo viewed 2.2 pages and stayed for an average of 1:06 minutes.
And yes, they can only count "visitors" from ISPs. Sometimes I seem to be visiting from Las Vegas, but it could also be Denver (level3 node). I never seem to visit from Lahaina (where we do live), but I do visit from Kahului (where the Clearwire node is).
And to be even more obscure, I never "visit" actual sites at all unless I am making a comment. I read a large number of blogs through Google Reader. So I don't visit a page at all most of the time though I read every new post in dozens of blogs.
Google Analytics is fun, but like most statistics, it's a lot of GIGO.
More Google Analytics...
Check under Visitors/Languages. For me:
If the assumed language of a visitor is English-US, then the pages per visit are 1.85, the average time onsite is 2:05, with a 73.38% bounce rate. I have similar rates for English and English-GB. But when I get to truly foreign languages, like Japan-Japanese or Lithuanian, the numbers drop to nothing.
As for the one second or less visit - sometimes I just sit here and hit the next blog button and cruise through sites at a fast rate of speed just looking for randomness.
When I hit a blog that has a "just arrived from" do-hicky (technical term) it usually shows that I live in Roxanna or South Roxanna. That would place my neighborhood in the midst of the oil refinery. Gotta love it!
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