Experiences with Google Analytics, part 2

MAY 18, 2011

As I’ve written before in part 1 of this article, having a website allows you to collect all sorts of different information about your visitors. I use Google Analytics to do this and have already shared some results from my main page (argote.mx). This time I will share some results I’ve gotten from flickr.argote.mx which is the site of a Web-App I wrote for Flickr.

This makes a significant difference in the stats given by Google Analytics since the people who tend to visit the Web-App are mostly photographers while my main site has visitors who are more likely to be into programming (or curious people who visit when I spam the links on my Twitter or Facebook pages).

I started tracking visits to the Web-App site 4 months ago so the data I’m showing here is from January 17th, 2011 through May 17th, 2011.

In that time there’s been 1930 pageviews in 1209 visits by 516 unique visitors coming from 37 different countries and 183 different cities (plus a small number of visitors for which location could not be resolved).

The 10 countries with the most visitors were:

1. Vietnam (281)

2. Australia (267)

3. United Kingdom (224)

4. United States (186)

5. Taiwan (67)

6. Mexico (51)

7. Canada (47)

8. Sweden (13)

9. Austria (10)

10. Netherlands (8)

By examining the traffic sources to my site, I was able to determine that the App’s high popularity in Australia, Vietnam and The United Kingdom is due to the fact that it has been highlighted on photography forums from those countries (which I presume are powered by IPB) and therefore users from such forums are using the App to post to their forums.

The 10 cities with the most visitors were:

1. Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh , Vietnam (166)

2. Melbourne, Australia (118)

3. Hanoi, Vietnam (101)

4. Sydney, Australia (67)

5. London, England (50)

6. Monterrey, Mexico (45)

7. Lima, United States (45)

8. Waterloo, Canada (25)

9. Brisbane, Australia (24)

10. Dunstable, England (23)

As in part one, I think the use of different Browsers, Operating Systems and Screen Resolutions amongst visitors to my site is even more interesting to look at.

Amongst the people who use the Web-App, Internet Explorer use is much more prevalent than for the visitors to the general Argote.mx site. This is probably due to the fact that many non-technical users visit the site. However Firefox and Chrome both have more users (especially Firefox).

Windows use is very prevalent too and Linux has a significantly smaller share than the main site. Again, this is due to the more non-technical nature of the Web-App.

In this case the most popular resolution (1920×1080) is significantly higher than the 1280×800 resolution that dominated the main site. Photographers tend to require space to work and it shows in the monitor selections they make. Of note, however, is the high prevalence of the ancient and outdated 1024×768 resolution; by filtering the analytics results I was able to determine that most of the 1024×768 traffic is coming from Vietnam (which is the top country in traffic for the site) so that is indicative that it is a relatively common resolution over there.

Overall, there are significant differences in both audiences (as I suspected) which I find interesting to observe. I was additionally able to tell that traffic to the Web-App is highly dependent on awareness of it through forums and other places where photographers or Flickr users interact.