Google Analytics

I never took stats in college. My math requirement was fulfilled by other more abstract classes like Calculus and Non-Euclidean Geometry. No really: I took a course on non-linear geometries, and though none of it has been useful in my life since the class finished, I still remember, vaguely, the axioms for the three line, three point space:
There are two points that exist in space.
There is a line that connects these two points.
There is a third spot on on this line.
Any two points must be connected by a line.
If I were sitting a few leagues under the sea and needed to sink a boat some miles off, I might find this proof useful, but I write about comics. To date, there has been no useable application for non-Euclidean geometry.

Back to my original point: I know nothing about useful math like statistics or economics. God help me when I have money to invest. Of course, it could be argued that my chosen career path will never present me with that problem. After all, I could invest my imaginary money any way I want to, buying unicorns off the penny stocks, or tracking the value of happiness trading. The rest of my life concerns the imagined, why shouldn't my finances?

So, this lack of pragmatic math makes my addiction to Google Analytics akin to a toddlers amusement with bright shiney objects: I don't know what I am looking at, but it looks really cool. See, I have been interested in knowing what sort of readership I have been getting from this page, and the lack of comments lead me, initially, to believe no one was reading. That I was dropping my words into the vacuum of the internet making neither a ripple nor a splash.

Once I installed the tracking code onto the page, I was amazed to find out I was getting a pretty steady increase in readership. I tend to get more readers around the time of publication, which makes sense, but I also tend to get random hits on my page (I think) between publications. Recently, on days of publication, I have been getting double digits hits, sometimes in the 40s and 50s. I feel like my child won class president in his Kindergarten class: certainly cool, but only relative to my narrow sphere of existence.

Of course, like most people in my field, numbers make little sense to me, so most of the information I have gleened from the page comes from starring at the charts and graphs that Google shows me. I am assuming when the chart spikes, that people are visiting my site, which is what I want to know: that someone clicked on my site. Google Analytics, though, wants to tell me if I have had visitors, repeat visitors, page visits, site hits, and so on. I'm not really sure what the difference is, so I tend to ignore that and make conclusions based purely on the pictures. This is how I can make claims about when people visit my site: there seems to be a spike around a certain day.

For example, when I click "page views" there is a significant spike around my birthday, which I attribute to people stopping by my Facebook page, seeing the link and clicking. That sort of connection makes sense to me. What is confusing, though, is that when I click visitors for that same day, it tells me I have only three visitors, all completely unique to the sight (those two numbers were the same; I put three and three together and got three). Without really understanding the data I am looking at, or how a statistician would interpret these numbers, I am left confused. Did three people look at 44 of the pages? Did 3 people come page to my page 44 times? It's just not clear what I am actually being told with these numbers.

So I tend not to try and link any of the charts, and instead I make conclusion based on each one individually. Here are some of the neat things I have found out by rummaging through the analytics:

1) From the Map Overlay, I have learned that from the time I installed the tracker (June 8th) until now I have had 182 visits to the page from 13 different countries. Obviously, knowing people in America and the UK, I wasn't surprised by that. Also, I have a friend in German (What up Sebastian) that follows this on RSS feed. What was more surprising where the three visits from Finland, and the single visits from Brazil, Russia, Lithuania, Sweden, the Netherlands and France. My Lithuanian visitor spent 15 minutes on the page, reading 10 different entries (if I am understanding the numbers correctly).

It also allows me to go deeper, examining the specific cities that visit my page the most. The winner in this category, I am making an assumption here, would be my brother-in-law Jason, who has visited my sight 52 times, almost twice that of the next closest visitor, the collected people of Chicago who have gone to my sight 28 times.

Another statistical oddity is that I have recieved three visits from Farmville, which to this point I was assuming existed only on Facebook, where people grow and harvest internet plants, spending hours at a time managing a virtual life, and in some cases, managing the virtual space far more effectively than the real space that encapsulates the virtual sphere.

One visitor from Berlin spent an hour on my site. This is remarkable only because said Berliner visited only once. He or she must have been impressed by what was there, which makes me wonder how what he saw that kept his attention for so long. If you read this again, let me know and I will try to cater to that request.

2) Beside showing me where people come from, Google also let's me know the primary language of the users, and not surprisingly, most people speak English, either American or British. I've also recieved visitors that spoke Finnish, German, Italian and something Google calls "pt-br".

3) While I recieved a lot of traffick on my birthday, September 22nd was the day I had the most unique visitors, or what I am assuming are computer signatures that have not come to my page previously. On that day, on Facebook, I advertised for this blog, and apparently some seventeen new people were interested in what I had to say.

I think this speaks to the power of Facebook as an advertisement tool. Considering I have just over 300 friends on Facebook (let me dust off my shoulders here), this is a 5% return on my investment (if I did my math right, and I am understanding the graph correctly). This is pretty amazing. Imagine if I were something more popular, like an electric car or a presidental candidate, something with a friends list in the hundred of thousands. Any messages conveyed there could reach a significantly higher audience than messages conveyed through other medias.

Of course, these are some bold claims to be making from a loose understanding of the graphs presented in from of me, but nonetheless, I feel there is something worth serious investigation here.

4) I have a fairly loyal readership. Granted, most of my visitors, 85 of them, have come once and never returned. 19 visitors, though, have returned between 9 and 14 times over the last couple of months. One visitor has come here more than 200 times. I feel I owe this person something, but there is no way I could tell who that is (though, again, if I am understanding the other numbers correctly, it's probably Jason).

5) Most visits to my page tage about 10 seconds or less time. Which makes sense. I imagine a lot of traffick I get from other countries is accidental, especially because I quote a song in the title. After that, the next highest collection of visit lengths ranges between ten and thirty minutes.

From this, it can be inferred that I get two types of visits: momentary or accidental visits, and actual readership. That feels good. I wish the actual readership would equal or exceed the accidental or passing readers, but one cannot be so lucky.


All in all, I find I waste a lot of free time clicking through all these images trying to imagine who you, the reader, are. I have a good indication, since some of my friends let me know. If you are a first time visitor, and this is your first time here, let me know. I would be interested to hear from new, strange readers.