I strongly urge anyone who is interested in their traffic statistics to install Google Analytics and the Feedjit widget on their blog. Since I did these two things on my Sihanoukville Journal, my readers have become real to me.
Finding my way around Google Analytics hasn’t been easy, but it’s been good fun as I discover new things all the time. The first time I realised I was doing something wrong was just after I boasted on Facebook that I had surpassed the 2000 visitors mark. Then one day I saw that my visitor numbers had dropped. How could that be? It was because the number is a monthly number, not a grand total.
That experience made me start playing around a little more on the the Google Analytics site. The little Map Overlay feature, for instance, is pretty cool, but when you click on “View Report,” it gets even cooler. A big colour coded map comes up and when you move your cursor around, you get a reading of the exact number of visitors you’ve had from different countries. By far the majority of mine were from the United States, but the UK, Australia and Canada’s numbers combined exceeded those of the US. That was interesting enough, but when I discovered I’d had a visitor from Saudi Arabia, 3 visitors from Uganda and 4 visitors from Turkey, I got really excited. Just the thought of a few people in these far flung places looking at my website brought home to me just how amazing the internet is.
Feedjit is a little widget I added awhile ago and wrote a short piece about here recently. Well, the more I use it, the more I love it. Aside from being able to see where your most recent visitors came from, you can click on “Real time view” at the bottom of the display and look at a much more extensive list that also shows how they found you. Just this evening I published a blog, Direct Flights from Australia Coming to Phnom Penh. As is my habit, I then shared it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious and Diggit. Now that I have Feedjit, I can see pretty clearly that Stumbleupon and Reddit are by far my best auxiliary traffic sources.
Even better from a human perspective is seeing where my visitors come from:
- 2 minutes ago, someone from Lansing Michigan viewed my Cycling in Sihanoukville post
- 30 minutes ago, someone in Las Vegas viewed my Direct Flights Post
- 7 minutes before that, a person in Vancouver BC viewed the same post
And so it goes: real people reading my blog. I guess it sounds a little narcissistic, but who blogs in the hope that no one will read what they have to say? I get tragically few visitors to this site, so I’m not going to add the Feedjit widget yet. But if I start writing more content here and can find a few keywords that can take me through the maze of writing related blogs, I should get enough traffic to make things interesting. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting, whoever you are and wherever you may be.
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