There are two things I like about using Blogger as a blogging platform:
- Ability to add pretty much everything I see on the web, as a portlet or worst case – using HTML/JS
- Analyzing traffic using Google Analytics.
I know wordpress and others allow for pretty much the same flexibility, and probably, someday, I will opt for WP in my own domain.
I’ve been incorporating some metrics into my blog, part of the openness and sharing I feel any blogger must adhere to. There’s no point sugarcoating things, not in the web 2.0 era.
Eventually, things come out. There are two interesting statistics I’d like to share, and your feedback and opinion are most welcome.
Firefox vs. IE
The first graph is analyzing traffic based on the user’s browser.
Apparently, people using the fox are spending double the time on my blog (65% to 32%), even thou the gap in number of visits (FF vs. IE) is only +200 pages, in favor of FF. I’m not the first to observe this, as FF is also the fav browser over at Luis Benitez. My guess is that FF users are more technology savvy – in a recent study, over 83% of FF users are running the most updated version. Also, I guess FF users are more custom to getting their daily fix by un-traditional medium – blogs, podcast, forums, twitter and such (in contrary to traditional sources as CNN, Fox, BBC, Ynet, Calcalist, etc). Then again, there could be no reason what so ever…
Twitter vs. Facebook
The second graph analyzes the top 10 referring sites to my blog, excluding direct traffic and search engines results. There are also columns for pages/visit and avg. time on site. I’ve highlighted in purple sites leading traffic to my blog, and in green the average time people spend.
In #1, way ahead of the rest, planetlotus.org, THE place to be heard, seen and read, at the Lotus community. The #2 site referring to my blog is Google Images. A surprising result I might say, but still, shows you the importance of image tagging and ‘alt name‘.
What I found more interesting is the 4th column, Avg. time on site. Apparently, people coming over from Blogger spend the most amount of time, over 5 min! In web 2.0 terms, that’s A LOT.
At #3 we can find traffic coming from facebook, which is also interesting. I tend to post stuff to my profile, from my blog and other sources. Good to know that although I don’t get that much traffic from facebook (only #8), my facebook buddies are spending 2min on my site!
Thanks friends. Conclusion: they like what they see, so I should keep posting.
There’s also the twitter angle. From time to time I tweet about the things I read. My followers are all early adopters, and technology savvy, so they will check the link out, but will ‘fast-read’ the page and move on. I guess tinyurl is also co-responsible for the traffic – you would click on http://tinyurl.com/63b28k and think twice on http://dvirreznik.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-bff-alan-lepofsky.html.
Hence why twitter is #4 on traffic referrals, but lower on time spent.
Links:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics Help Center
With all the different technologies and platform out there, it’s difficult to keep track of what and where everything is located. Whenever I read something of interest, that’s worth keeping, I have this flow of browser buttons, like a a process (hey, I work for Big Blue, we invented processes) – del.icio.us, dogear, twitter, facebook.