Nerd-alert! Google Analytics is our friend!

Lately we have been researching ways to get new traffic to the blog and to find ways to better understand who is visiting our page. As I am working for an internet company, in my role at work, I am always conscious about the value of a good traffic flow, and am fairly acquainted with key metrics for what makes a website successful; high number of UV’s, a relatively low bounce rate, lots of views, good conversion, and returning visitors. What I didn’t realize though was how amazing Google’s tracking tool ‘Google Analytics’ really is! Shaena and I implemented the tool on the blog last week, and as the nerds we are, we have followed the development of the stats daily to see how it develops. A bit sad really.

With Google Analytics, you can really get down to a granular level and see everything from number of unique visitors, to traffic channels, which country and city your visitors are coming from, and even information like which web browser the visitors are using and what their internet connection and screen resolution is! And it is free!

To give you a little sample of the information we have collected so far:

- Our users are spending on average 3minutes and 20 seconds/visit on our site
- Approximately 65% of our users stay on the home page and never click on any titles
- 40% of our visitors go directly to www.harrisonhelin.com, the rest come in through referrals from other websites and search engines
- In the last couple of days we have had visitors from 33 cities in 10 countries, Sweden and Canada included. Sweden is leading the traffic to the site by far. (Dad!)
- 62% of our visitors are using Internet Explorer, (and only Michelle is using Google Chrome!)

We are gob smacked!