Congratulations, you are the 10,000 visit to this site

Have a pat on the back.  Unfortunately I can’t give you a prize, because I’m not rich enough.  Sorry.  You’ll just have to make do with a warm fuzzy feeling in your belly.  This is the message that is going out to the person who viewed this blog at about 7:00 (GMT) on Wednesday 28th April 2010.  Yes that’s right, this blog has managed to hit yet another mile stone.  If only it had happened on the 100th post, instead it will be the 90th post that I write yet another one of those posts that attempts to show how great I am.  Or more particularly what you guys have found interesting about this blog over the last 10,000 visits.

So what I thought I’d do here, is bring up some graphs that show you some cool stuff that you can do with Google Analytics, as well as telling you a bit more about what has been going on with this site.  Two for the price of one, you see.

Well, years ago when I said that there were five simple tricks of why your visits have gone up, the number one thing I said that you should do is look at where your visits are coming from.  Well that is all well and good on a small time period, but what if you want to look at how many of your traffic sources have performed over time?  Well this is where you need to add in your advanced segments, which are very useful.  I know that I have three important sources to me:  Those that came from Organic Search; those that came from direct traffic; those that came from links from other websites:

One of the advantages of the advanced segments is that it puts them on the graph as well.  Here above you can see that the increase in visits from the last month was really from more people arriving at the blog from direct traffic and a few more from referral traffic.  Whereas my search traffic has remained constant over time.  So the next thing I did was to throw together a couple of segments for some of my major referring websites to see how they had changed over time.  That’s really easy with your segment builder – you just need to choose your traffic sources and then give it a value:

So as you can see the most recent increases in visits have been caused by firstly an increase in visits from Blogger – most of these came from people who were searching through blogger in the search bar up there and clicked on ‘next blog’.  Protip: if you don’t want random traffic that isn’t likely to stay on the site, don’t put a picture of Kate Moss on your blog with a reference to her name (PS – who clicks on that button anyway?  I just did and ended up on LacyLike – it looks good, but it isn’t that relevant to my blog).  New visits were high and the bounce rate was high as well for those visits (drill down by clicking on the name in Google Analytics, that is what it is for!).

But also popular recently has been some Twitter activity that has seen me get a large volume of posts (that’s @whencanistop for any of you out there that want to follow my random posts).  There were a couple of retweets of posts that I had on Twitter in the last couple of months that pointed towards a few interesting stories around Omniture:

I’ve just found a useful application that appears to show all tweets linking to a post of yours (I have never noticed this before).  Here are the tweets pointing towards a post on custom reporting in Omniture and here is one showing all the tweets pointing towards a post on dashboards in Omniture.

I’ve also included in this report above visits coming from Google.  I’m not going to do it now, but this is actually two groups of people, who I should really treat as such – those coming from Google.com (probably RSS feeds) and those coming from Google Images.  It’s interesting to note that this is a fairly steady stream of visits, which of course pleases me.

I’m sure you’ll be interested to hear that in two and a half years, this blog has one post that has far more visits that any other post.  It is the one that shows you what to do with your funnel analysis.  Every time I write one of these posts looking back at what has happened, that is always the case and I always say I should revisit it.  Years ago I was telling journalists to write evergreen content because it is the hand that keeps on giving and it is always true.

Not only is it a good piece in terms of visits, most of its traffic came from Google and I think you’ll agree that this is really a low bounce rate for traffic coming from Google.  Number one thing you should do when you look at your top pages is to look at the bounce rate and see if it is keeping people on your site.  What can you do to get more of them to stay.  Well you could write a new post about conversion funnel analysis and link to it from your old one.  Remember this is based on scent, so use that drop down to find out where they came from and what search engine terms they typed into Google to get there.

Well I’m sure you get the picture now.  Below are the top ten pages.  I could go into each of these and work out where the users came from to get to them, but you’d be bored in this post.  You should be doing these things for your top pages though so that you can work out how to optimise them:

What I thought I’d finish on is a bit of a description of where you guys come from.  Obviously the point of my blog is not to make me any money (no adverts) or to sell consultancy (I don’t do it), but to share some of my knowledge with you.  Ok, so the more people who are aware of Analytics and the basics, the more likely I am to get a job; but it is also that the more people are aware of the basics the more chance of them asking me exciting questions about what they can do with their site with the data.  So really I’m mainly aiming at UK people, but you guys in the US are of course welcome to read my insights.  From the south bank of the Thames looking out across the City things are looking quite rosy today:

But from the 112 different countries people have been in when looking at my blog, things probably look a lot different.  Whether you are one of the 4,502 US visitors, the 2,089 UK visitors or the person who was in Nepal, I hope that my blog helps you make you place a little rosier too.