piksels

For me (and for most people) Google Analytics is mainly just a tool to see how many hits we are getting, where they are coming from, etc. It is a shame because if anyone takes a couple extra minutes to really look at what its telling us, we can actually learn something about our visitors.

Here’s a chart showing where Piksel’s visitors are coming from.

It’s no surprise that they majority of users are coming from the social news network Digg. Being ‘dugg’ can send a site tens of thousands of visitors within a matter of hours, but to no surprise, the page hits won’t last for long, and after 2-3 days the typical digg users will be long gone. From the thousands of digg visitors, you would be lucky to even have 1% return to your site. If someone were to ask whether I preferred 10,000 digg visitors or 1,000 StumbleUpon visitors, I would have to go with the StumbleUpon. And here’s why:

Above is a chart showing the time the users spent on the site, and how many of them stayed on the site and viewed more pages. Although digg users come in large volumes, they clearly spend the least amount of time on the site. While in complete contrast, StumbleUpon users spend noticeably more time on the site, and are more likely to browse more than one page of your site.

Don’t get me wrong, the being ‘dugg’ is great (as long as your server stays up). It gives you exposure, it gets you out there, and everyone knows that with such a large amount of traffic there are bound to be visitors which will come back. But in the end it is a question of quality vs quantity. Do you want your visitors to take their time to read it, or do you want to get as many advertisement clicks as possible?

I will be posting more about visitor culture, and interesting ways on how to use Google Analytics soon.

-joel