I’m watching you… well, Google is watching you
I signed up for Google Analytics last month as I wanted to gather some statistics for this website. I thought about using Webalizer, which I use for other sites, but I wanted to give Google’s solution a go.
After signing up for Analytics and embedding a chunk for javascript into the site template, I had to wait a further two weeks before the chunk of javascript was detected by Google. Once it was detected it took a further 2 days before any reports were generated. So if you have just signed up, then expect a bit of a wait before you cast your eyes on your website’s statistics.
I was very impressed with the reports that were generated. Apart from the usual stats that you get with other server log file analysers – such as search engine keywords, entry pages and exit pages – you also get a map of the world showing you the location of visitors from around the world. From this map you can see that most of the visitors originate from Australia, Spain and the US. I suspect the Australian visitors are either visits from my friends, or sadly they could just be me. The visitors from Spain and the US are probably those that are interested in e-portfolios, more specifically tracking my progress on dotfolio.
For those visitors interested in dotfolio, I would like to state that I have not forsaken dotfolio. In fact I am working on this other package called Curriculum Central that will add learner focused tracking features to dotfolio. I have about 2 weeks left of development on Curriculum Central before returning to work on dotfolio.
I find the geographical demographics to be quite useful in providing an overview of this site’s visitors. There are other sections of the Analytics report that provides graphs and numbers. They are useful, but not as interesting as the Geo Overlay.
