First Quarter 2007
Below is a collection of screenshots from Google Analytics
results for the JRM Lab.
Click on a graph for a larger version.
| In late May 2006, I was able to subscribe the JRM site to Google Analytics, a free service that provides a variety of traffic analysis tools that leverage Google's enormous infrastructure. This new page has been added with screenshots of some of the more interesting of that data. There's also data from Google Webmaster Tools, aka, Google Sitemaps. | |
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| Webmaster's Overview provides data on page views and the network and geographical origins of the viewers. By Google's definition of a "View", we got about 131,000 page views for the quarter. Our own server logged about 473,000 "requests" for that period, using Analog's definition of request. Google typically reports about 35% of our request count; they probably has a stricter definiton, and is excluding robots. |
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| Unique Views of content tells us what our most popular pages are. This lists squares well qualitatively with our own logs: the MSDS list, our home page, safety resources and tutorials are the most popular content. |
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| Average Time is the time that a visitor actually spends on a given page, and is difficult to measure reliably. We don't have an equivalent catagory in our own log analyses. The most time seems to spent on the most text-heavy pages, like the tutorials and the computing FAQ, which makes sense. |
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| The above shows the time visitors spent on our most popular pages. This graph shows the pages that they spent the most time on out of the entire site. Note that these pages got very little traffic compared to our popular ones. |
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| Browser Versions lists the web browser software used by visitors. This agrees well with our own data and follows Web-wide trends. This data is of some importance to a webmaster who wants to be sure his pages can been seen properly by as many visitors as possible. During this quarter we deployed Internet Explorer 7 locally, and its use grew quickly. Last October IE7 accounted for 3% of IE browsers; in April that had grown to 35%. |
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| Screen Resolutions reports the display settings of a visitor's monitor, and is another metric that our logs do not record. This is another parameter important to an author; if a page doesn't fit on the viewer's screen, he won't see it as you intended. The vast majority of the JRM pages have a width of 690 pixels, chosen to fit on an older 800x600 monitor and make a pleasant window size at higher resolutions. Web-wide we are just starting to see authors assume the larger displays that this data shows to be predominant. |
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| Googlebot Crawl Rate is a feature added to Google Sitemaps in late October 2006. It shows how often Google crawls our pages. You can see the visits are episodic. Clicking the thumbnail at right will give you the full set of graphs showing the crawl rate by visits, time and traffic. |
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