A Brief Look At My Website Stats

Remember those days when people used to put website hit counters on their site (actually I still see this every so often)? These days we are more secretive about our stats, or we simply don’t see the need to share them openly with the rest of the world.

After checking my Google Analytics account recently, I thought it might be of interest to publicise some of my findings. So I selected 1 month, April 1st - April 30th 2009, and here are the findings.

Dashboard

Areas of interest

• The most daily visits was on Monday April 20th (3,840)
• The least daily visits was on Sunday April 5th (548)
• Monday is the most popular day (usually the day I publish blog posts)
• Sunday is the least popular day

Visitors

Areas of interest

• The most popular browser was Firefox (65.64%) followed by Safari (12.42%) and Internet Explorer (12.17%)
• Out of the 12.17% IE users, 17.82% used IE6 (1,037)
• 3 users were using IE5.5
• The most popular OS was Windows (64.38%) followed by Mac (31.10%)
• 595 people visited my site on the iPhone, 124 on the iPod and 3 on the PS3
• The most popular resolution was 1280x800 (19.09%)
• 9.77% had a resolution of 1024x768 and 0.3% had a resolution of 800x600

Traffic sources

Areas of interest

• The top 10 keywords were:
  1. twitter themes
  2. lee munroe
  3. twitter theme
  4. twitter backgrounds
  5. twitter page design
  6. freelance web designer
  7. web design trends
  8. get more twitter followers
  9. twitter profile background
  10. call to action buttons
• 2 people arrived by searching for 'the spank machine'
• 1 person arrived by searching for 'excited hot female'
• Stumbleupon referred 3,676 people, closely followed with 3,564 from Twitter
• The top 10 referrers were:
  1. stumbleupon.com
  2. twitter.com
  3. smashingmagazine.com
  4. ajaxrain.com
  5. wordpress.org
  6. smashingapps.com
  7. google.com
  8. delicious.com
  9. sixrevisions.com
  10. daily.creattica.com
• 6,979 visits came from Google, while only 58 from yahoo and 38 from msn

Content

Areas of interest

• The top 10 pages were:
  1. Homepage
  2. Designing out of the box
  3. 15 beautiful typography inspired websites
  4. 25 hot female web designers part 2
  5. Portfolio
  6. Call to action buttons
  7. 30 creative twitter theme backgrounds
  8. 5 quick and easy ways to optimise your website
  9. 25 hot female web designers
  10. Blog
• Generally, the top 10 landing pages were the same as the top 10 exit pages, which were the same as the top 10 visited pages (therefore my bounce rate isn't very good)

Conclusion

So what does all this mean?

• Constantly writing useful blog posts on your site is a good idea
• Writing guest posts for other sites can be useful
• Being active on Twitter matters
• Posting blog posts on the weekend isn't as effective as during the week
• There are people who still use IE6
• You can pretty much forget about having to design for 800x600 anymore. Most users have at least 1024x768 and higher resolutions
• Remember people will access your site on different platforms, including mobile/iPhone
• Submit your site & posts to social sites like Delicious and Stumbleupon
• Twitter is a hot search topic at the minute

Of course these conclusions are only drawn from my readers. Things may be different for your site depending on your target market.

What are your stats like? What’s the oddest thing someone has searched for to find your site? How many people use IE6? Please share below.