Who Is Visiting Your Site?

My favorite part of Google Analytics is looking at what they can tell me about my site visitors. (If you're unsure what constitutes a "visit" in GA, refer back to this post here first.) Each time you load a web page in your browser by visiting that site, the logs track a tremendous amount of information about you. For instance, the  IP address of your computer isn't likely to change while you're surfing the web, and Google looks to see all the pages you visit in one session. That information is then analyzed to display a total number of visits (sessions), as well as the number of unique visits - new visitors vs. repeat visitors. They also identify the average number of pages viewed per visit, and the average amount of time spent on a website.

Some useful statistics for your webmaster are covered in the Technical Profile. This part covers browsers and operating systems used, screen resolutions, Flash versions, even connection speeds of your visitors. This helps your webmaster decide what settings are optimal for your visitors. For instance, aside from 4 visits from an iPhone this past month, I know that 99.4% of my visitors were using monitors that could view pages a minimum of 1024 pixels wide, confirming my choice of designing this site to use a width of 1000 pixels. The connection speeds are important for sites with multimedia, to ensure that your visitors can quickly access your audio and video and even interactive/Flash files. You might think your 10 minute video is of vital importance, but if the majority of your visitors are still on dial-up, chances are they're getting frustrated waiting for your video to load and are leaving your site.

My absolute favorite part of the Visitor analysis is the Map Overlay, a geographic map identifying where your site visitors are located.  This usually confirms what you expect, for instance my school's site visitors are mostly (85%) from the immediate area. But we also had visitors from 39 other states, the two with the most are neighboring states. So we can conjecture those are families who may be moving to the area and are looking for a good school for their children. I had a number of Canadians look at my business site this past month, and I'm working on a project with some Canadian team members. Their locations correlate to some of my Canadian site visitors. This is where it gets fun, making reasonable guesses as to who is actually looking at your website.