Navel gazing

This morning Cardgrrl posted a note about her Google Analytics stats. I've had G.A. running for about a year and a half now, but have really done very little with it other than tracking daily page hits, and once in a while seeing what searches bring new people by. Until reading Cardgrrl's post, I didn't even know that it had the capability of tracking unique visitors, and while looking for how to do that, I found a bunch of other ways of analyzing reader data that I didn't know were there. Thought I'd share some of them with you, using the past 365 days as the time frame.

While I have enough of a competitive streak that I'm capable of deliberate one-upsmanship, this honestly isn't being posted to brag that I have more readers than Cardgrrl. If Shamus or Pauly or Iggy or Wicked Chops were to post their numbers, it would show how small-time I really am. I'm well aware that I have more visitors than some poker blogs, fewer than others, and I'm perfectly content with that being as it is. As the title to this post indicates, this is just me expressing my curiosity about what's going on, not boasting (nor complaining, either).

Here are the most popular posts/pages that people look at. Not surprisingly, the Cannery backroom story was far and away the most viewed, since notice of it got spread rather far and wide.




Here's a list of what people are looking for in search engines that lands them on this site. I have noted in the past how strange it is that my rather offhand comments about whether there are any gay professional pokers consistently top the list (after the obvious searches to find the whole blog), with Tom Dwan being the one that started my pondering.




Here's where people are coming from, net-wise:




And here's their geographical distribution:










How long do viewers stick around on average?



I went through the full list of dates (not shown above) to see what caused the most prolonged page views. Nothing surprising. They correlated almost perfectly with the days that I wrote either the most or the longest posts. The nice thing about that is it suggests that people actually read through what I put up, even on the days that it takes longer.

Unique visitors:



32,551 of you???? Good grief, haven't all of you people got anything better to be doing with your time?
:-)

It's nice to see that there is reasonably steady growth over time (excepting the obvious big Cannery spike).



Incidentally, that up-and-down fluctuation you see is an extremely consistent weekly variation, with a drop on the weekends followed by a spike on Mondays. This suggests that people are reading while at work, and catching up on Saturday and Sunday posts on Monday. Tsk, tsk, tsk! Hey! That's not what they're paying you for!

This next one has me a bit puzzled. I'm not sure why the most common duration of visit is less than ten seconds. Best guess is that means people check in, find nothing new since the last visit, and move on.




The "recency" numbers took me a while to decipher. 74% are "0 days ago." Obviously, this can't mean that 74% of all page views in the last year took place within the past 24 hours. I assume it means that out of all of the visits in the past year, 74% of the time the viewer's previous visit had been within the past 24 hours. Assuming that's right, it means that a very high fraction of visitors are daily (or even more-than-daily) regulars, which I find more humbling and flattering than I know how to convey.





The "visitor loyalty" suggests, not surprisingly, that there was a big chunk of people who were looking for one specific thing, found it, and didn't look around much or come back. However, after that group the next most common is the bunch of you that peeked in more than 200 times, which, again, is just mind-boggling to me. It is often the case that I can't understand why anybody would be so interested in what I might have to say, but I never cease being grateful that it is so.