i recently started using google analytics to see what i could find out about how my site is used.
to start with, let me assure you that there’s no personal info collected or recorded. it’s all just aggregated info, like how many people came from google, and yahoo, and msn, and who uses internet explorer (stop that!) versus firefox versus safari, and which pages are the most popular, and if you have flash installed and which version it is, and so on.
and there’s a section called “referrers” where i can see if a lot of people are coming from a particular site. that’s how i learned that the grey gardens site had linked to my review page.
if i had ads on this site, which i don’t and [probably] never will, it would tell me a lot of stuff about those things, too. but that’s a section of google analytics that means nothing to me.
the most interesting part of google analytics for me is the neat little map of the world i get on the front page. on this map are little dots that correlate to the location of the people who visit my site.
and i don’t get that friggin’ many, about 100 per day to be exact, more or less, so the dots are pretty distinct. i’m sure this map is meaningless to a person who ran a high-traffic site, but every one of my dots means something to me.
like my nairobi dot.
that’s right–there’s someone in kenya who visits my site. and pretty regularly, if the map is to be believed.
hello, nairobi. thanks for stopping by.
if you’re a regular visitor, and want me to notice your particular dot, leave me a comment and consider it done.
