Above the Fold: The Blog

Today I learned that I have visitors to my big site from further afield than I’d imagined. I’ve always known that I have visitors from the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia, but the Geo overlay from Google Analytics is showing hits from Singapore and Thailand. I can’t quite decide whether GA is accurate there or whether that’s the results of web proxies and unfortunately I’ve never had access to geographical splits before to be able to judge. It’s still rather interesting, though, and I’ll be keeping an eye on that.

I also learned that the majority of visitors to this site are based in the UK. Oddly, none of them so far use Macs but I’m sure that when I’ve got more than two days of data this will rectify itself.

A nice feature is the ability to download any of the data in several different formats, so that I could do further analysis on data if I so desired or insert graphs and charts into presentations. Again, none of the hosts or free packages that I’ve tried have offered that facility and I could see that being one of the selling points for big companies.

Being able to see how long people are spending on pages will also be useful. The site hosts a variety of content so I’m going to be interested to find out what people spend time on and what people gateway through quickly. And knowing the proportion of new and returning visitors is an important measure that I’ve never had before - the big site has lots of content, far more than can be absorbed in one visit, so I’ll be intrigued to see whether I’m getting mostly one-off visitors or whether there really is a decent sized core audience.

In other Google stuff, I introduced mother to Google Talk this evening. It was much less traumatic than I thought it would be. Now hopefully she’ll be able to talk her sister through it and they’ll be able to do more transatlantic gossiping.

I also took a tour around my father’s company’s new website. I’ve only had a few minutes, but it’s a definite improvement on the old one. It looks much better, more professional, and actually has a consistent design across the pages. An accountancy firm needs that kind of trustworthy design, I feel.

From an accessibility point of view, there are still some big improvements that could be made but it’s at least much better than it was. The horizontal drop-down navigation built in JavaScript is supplemented with a good sitemap and browsing it with images and styles turned off wasn’t too painful. There are elements that could be improved - web designers really should be trying to move away from tables used as layout - but at least it’s worth the money they paid this time. It will be going live next week and I’m going to be making gentle inquiries (*snort*) about it’s success not long after.

I am rather a sad geek, sometimes, and have a tendency to want to check out anything that Google is working on to see how well it does. Most of their products have worked very well, often better than their rivals’, so it’s always interesting to poke around in their Labs section or take a look at anything I see written up or discussed.

This week I’ve been playing with a couple of Google products. The first has been Google Calendar, which does exactly what it says on the box and I rather like it. Possibly if I didn’t already have a Google account then I wouldn’t have tried this out, but I thought it would be interesting. The real advantage to me is being able to transport my calendar between work and home easily, avoiding those potentially embarrassing moments when you double book yourself because you didn’t look at one or the other. For that, Google does a good job. The calendar is easy to set up, easy to log into and adding entries to it is fairly similar to adding entries to any other calendar package.

The only little niggles are the US-centric nature of their location information - they link into Google maps when you enter a location for an event but default to the USA. I somehow don’t think that I’m spending a week in Sidmouth Colorado this summer That said, it’s a beta application so they’re sure to continue improving it and it fills the function I wanted. It’s also quick to run, which is handy.

The much more exciting product that I’m investigating is Google Analytics. I applied for an invitation code a few weeks ago and it was issued yesterday. I’ve already been in and set up profiles for two web sites to see how it works. It’s all quite simple and they provide the little JavaScript snippet that needs to be added to each page that you want to track. Setting up this site, Above the Fold, wasn’t difficult because it’s a fairly small site and it’s all been modularised in PHP, so I just had to add the code to the footer file.

The other site hasn’t been completely set up because it has around 150 pages to add the code to. It’s my fannish site, which has grown rather large over the years and it’s the one that I’m most interested in having a peek at. One day I will set up the entire site in PHP to make these changes easier. For now, the reviews section (built on a PHP/MySQL backend) has been added to Analytics because that’s just a case of adding the snippet to a footer file and a few templates. I’ve also added the major indexes and all the pages for another entire section. I’ll get to the rest of the pages over the weekend.

I installed the code and did the various set ups in the analytics panel yesterday and took a look at my first bunch of data tonight. I have to admit that it’s much more detailed than what I have available from my ISP. Just looking at the first page gives me more data. One of the nice features in that first page is a map that shows where my visitors are coming from with dots appropriately sized to the number of visitors from that location. It’s even differentiating between parts of the USA. The host for that domain has never been able to track geographic location.

It’s handling the dynamic content with ease, another point that my host hasn’t got, so I can start to see exactly what people are most interested in on the reviews section. Analytics shows me the full URL with the apended variables, rather than just saying “quick_search.php” without that breakdown. That will be handy.

It gives me lots of information on entry and exit points in the site, something that I’ve never been able to track, and should give me trends over time for that stuff. Knowing which pages are immediate bounces will also be useful.
One of the really useful features is a navigation overlay. It loads up my site with little clicky things over any links so that I can request more information on who is using those links. Very handy for improving navigation.

Keyword search information is also much more detailed than my host provides and I can track that information over time. I’ve previously relied on wading through screens of referral data from search engines.

There’s lots of good information on browser, platform and screen resolution with a couple of surprises - apparently I have visitors using Safari on Linux and barely anyone using 800×600 resolution. 1024×768 is the favourite. 12% of yesterday’s visitors use Firefox on windows.

I’m going to be delving down further as more data is gathered, but at the moment I can safely report that Google is right when it says it’s one of the most powerful analytics packages out there. And it’s all free.