I spent some time studying the data collected by Google Analytics from my web site launch last week. What follows is an exhaustive analysis. What I learned is that getting stumbledupon is like being Rickrolled in reverse. I also learned that Germany rules.
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I had heard of this site from a friend of mine a long time ago but hadn't seen its utility. It appears that somebody else added my site to their list yesterday. The bounce rate was extremely high, and page views were low. The traffic was perfect for figuring out what random users would do on my site, though.
I sifted through the data since the launch. What I learned was that traffic spikes are fairly useless in and of themselves, but if they create a proportional amount of repeat traffic then they're probably worth it. In this case the repeat traffic appears to be around 10%.
Mmmm. Percentage signs. There's nothing that spins data quite like them. Good old SHIFT-5. I'll type more soon, but first, let's define our terms:
Unique Page Views: A rough measure of how many people actually visit the site.
Page Views: The total number of pages viewed.
Average Page Views: The average number of pages viewed per visitor.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who view just one page and leave.
Average Time On Site: The average time a user spent on the site.
Direct Hits: People who were not referred to the site; they typed in 'www.3232design.com' into their address bar or used a bookmark.
Hits: That's you.
Hit Feeder: That's where you clicked the link to get here.
Repeat Traffic: Anyone who has previously visited the site and not cleared any Google cookies.
The slower but steadier page hit feeders (deviantART, coolhomepages.com, Google AdWords, direct hits) are the highest quality hits. You can define quality in various ways for various sites, but for business brochureware sites like this one a good measure is high average time on site, low bounce rate, and high average page views. This means that the hits are spending more time on the site (2.5 minutes average time on site) viewing more pages (3.9 average page views). Presumably this means they are interested in the content, and interested people lead to sales. I don't know what it is about Germany, but they're spending upwards of 1/2 hour on the site, viewing over 10 pages each. I'm like the David Hasselhoff of web design.
The spike traffic sites (deviantART Daily Deviation, Slashdot post signature link, stumbleupon.com) are pretty low-quality hits. The bounce rate is between 60% and 90% (as opposed to 20% to 30% for the steady hit feeders), the average page views are below 2, and the average time on site is less than a minute.
But that doesn't mean they aren't useful hits, they're just less targeted. And out of those hits, a small percentage appears to be returning later, building repeat traffic overall. Higher traffic means greater exposure.
For those of you who like statistics, here are some percentage signs: Mac users are 23% of the audience. This is probably high due to the deviantART and coolhomepages.com traffic, since a lot of web designers check those sites out and a lot of artsy people work on Macs. Of the Windows users: XP: 77%; Vista: 18%; W2K: 1.5%; Server 2003: 1.5%. Quit surfing from your web servers, people. That's how you get pwned.
FireFox is 53% to IE's 30% (of those: IE6: 38%, IE7: 60%, IE8: 0.7%.) Holy crap, when did IE8 come out? It's possible that it's been out for a long time but it's so broken that nobody can actually surf the web. Safari is 12%, and specialty browsers like Opera trail the last 3%. Those would be our mainstream-bashing Slashdot friends.
It would be appropriate to note here that if javascript is disabled in your browser then you are not counted by Google. This appears to be less than 1% of the traffic, based on a differential analysis of Google's page hits vs. the raw server logs.
Nearly everyone who visited had Flash 9 (95%), which is not surprising since most people are here to check out the cool Flash design. The most popular screen resolutions are 1280x1024 and 1024x768. The highest resolution was 3360x1050 (thanks for stopping by, Mr. Gates) and the lowest resolution was 800x600 (seriously, would it kill you to buy a new monitor?).
The final round of stats is connection speed. This was the area of most concern to me, since my page weighs in at almost 150Kb with the page background image and Flash movie. Luckily, only .02% of the hits were on dialup. I was pretty surprised by that number.
So what do all these numbers mean? For this type of web site, it's a good start. Repeat traffic is 10%, which by extrapolating for this hit volume means that in several months I should have an ample supply of leads from the website. An overall bounce rate of 30% to 40% is pretty good, and with 2-4 average page views people like what they're seeing.
But the most important thing I learned is that my spellchecker doesn't know who Rick Astley or David Hasselhoff is. On the bright side, it also didn't know what getting pwned was. You are in sirius treble win your speelchecker gets pwned.
