I was originally thinking of just posting the analytics for last week, but I’ve been receiving WordPress stats since this notebook started and I implemented Google Analytics towards the end of September so I might as well show the results of the whole month. Also I was going to post on Friday, but realized that stats taken for that day weren’t finished and decided to wait until this week to post concluded analytics.

Since I don’t know how to get data out of WordPress stats and only just learned that GA data can be exported, I took screen shots of the data. Unfortunately that means the data isn’t interactive (but it isn’t that way in a paper anyway), but hopefully I’ll learn how to deal with it in the coming weeks.

Finally I just want to say that from here on out data will only be of the previous week, and maybe a quick monthly report. In weekly data sets I’ll be looking at page views, visitors, and navigation. In monthly reports I’ll be looking at stat summaries, but will include popular pages, world maps, and whatever else is fun at the time. Today I’ve got a bunch of stuff so let’s jump right in!

[portfolio_slideshow]

On top of what I’ve written in the captions of the pictures above, I looked at some other details of the stats available to me and jot a few things down:

• The average visitor time on site is around 2 minutes. This means people are staying and reading content. If visitors weren’t interested and left immediately this number would be lower. What’s more is that the average number of pages visited is 2, which means there is some site navigation. Since most information is posted to the main page there doesn’t need to be much navigation to determine usefulness. Having any in the context of a blog format (to me) is a pretty big deal.
• With that said I noted the average time spent on 2 popular posts. For the ONS vs traditional scientific infrastructure post visitors spent an average of 2:48 (min:sec) on the page. This post is rather long which means visitors skimmed, left immediately, or read until they found relevant information and then left the site/page. On the first Impact Factor post (posted Friday) visitors spent an average of over 9min on the page (9:23)! I can’t explain that at all.
• It should be noted that my visits are supposed to be blocked so they don’t get tracked in the data. I say supposed to be because there are 13 visits in GA from CHTM. At least 90% of those are me (accounting for friends and Koch). I usually mess in the back end of the site and almost never see the actual content (except in preview modes) so there is very minimal effect on my part anyway. It also should be noted that 13 views from 480 views is 2.7% so my impact is very negligible.
• I am a firm believer in the uselessness of Twitter. Well they are showing me, because Twitter is my biggest referral. In fact, because of this whenever I post something new that I want to ensure it’s success I ask Koch to retweet my post. It’s impact snowballs from there and within 24 hours I will have a considerable number of hits (compared to my daily average). Social networking works!
• The average page load time is 30 seconds. That is staggeringly high, but I think I can attribute it to one main cause: The water evaporation experiment. The slideshow script takes a while to load and I had 8 on the main page for about 2 weeks. This would definitely explain the high avg load time.

Now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for (well at least I was). I did a comparison of the number of page views for various dates from both GA and WordPress. I’ve been complaining about inconsistencies, but it appears that they are actually pretty similar with a couple of exceptions:

If you have any suggestions for tracking, making the data open, things you’d like to see specific to the site stats, or whatever else let me know in the comments.