Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Google Analytics

ROCKS!

It finally kicked in for me. It is awesome, even though it highlights the fact that I'm three inches tall.

It also shows me that I have the most hits over the weekend, even though my weekends contain no postings, and fewest hits at the beginning of the week, even though the beginning of the week is when I have the most postings.

Hm. Weekends are probably just really popular. Once I'm on my own, I'll start weighing in on weekends.

Oh, and most of my hits come from google searches, but apparently no particular Google searches, since there's no popular ones leading to me. Next in line are people from grand text auto, presumably having read Patrick's advertisement of my Movies review.

And MOST of my visitors use FireFox. Huzzah for you! On the other hand, NONE of my visitors use Linux. 95.84% of them use Windows. I guess that's to be expected: Linux isn't hugely game-friendly.

My god! This is a wealth of information. Most screen resolutions are 1024x768 or 1280x1024, with all others a very distant last place. And I got a small but significant number of visitors using 16-bit color instead of 32-bit color. Most of my audience is registered as English-American, has Java enabled, and has Flash. The majority have Cable/DSL, with a significant chunk still using dialup.

On the negative side, it doesn't seem to count feeds. Hm.... I bet if I embedded the javascript in the feed... but that doesn't work, does it? I'm not in the header. Oh well, it doesn't matter, blogspot doesn't allow "script" tags.

On the positive side, my average view time is over seven minutes! This is a brutally weighted length, however. The vast majority of my visits are over in less than ten seconds - sob! - but a significant chunk stayed more than ten minutes. Did they just forget, and leave the page open?

Anyhow, go sign up for Google Analytics. At the very least, it will let you feel the depth of your unpopularity!

EDIT: People found me through some very strange searches. "Smegging" is my favorite, for sheer classiness. But things like "Cringely Google", "Anti-stealth 2005", "anakin armpit hair clone wars", "i will survive sang by aliens" (ha, that one actually makes sense!), and "pictures of deer taking a crap".

Bizarre... what could these people have been looking for? Whatever it was, now I'm TWICE as likely to get pinged by people searching for pictures of deer taking craps.

EDIT the SECOND: My god, I'm the second result for 'anakin "armpit hair" "clone wars"'. This because one of my month-archives has a post talking about armpit hair, and another post about clone wars. I would have wondered about my sanity if they'd been in one post.

I don't think I'll do the Googling for "pictures of deer taking a crap"...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cross-reference is the ticket. I also got you on the blogroll at GamesAreArt. This is a blog more people need to read.

Craig Perko said...

I got a significant percentage of of browsers from GamesAreArt.com. Thanks for the link, although I'm depressed that "seven" is a significant percentage. :P

Textual Harassment said...

Too bad it can't analyze RSS users. I usually just read the feeds of my subscribed blogs, and I only click through if I want to comment or if I suspect pictures in the feed.

Search referrals are always an unexpected source of entertainment for webmasters. How (un?)fortunate that search engines are anonymous!