Analytics

Google is always trying to hook me up with their latest and greatest gadget for making my blog be smarter, be hipper, and make all the little girls swoon.   I have at times taken them up on their new gizmo offers, but generally I ignore them.  New gadgets mean I need to decipher language and instructions that often leave me saying ?huh? even after reading them four times.  Such was the case when I hooked up with "Analytics" a few years back when Google first introduced it.  It just doesn't tell me how many people have stopped by.  I think if I know what filters to use, it will tell me their underwear size and what color they were wearing when they stopped by.

It's got bounce rates, number of visitors, number of page views, how long they view each page, percentage numbers that move up and down to some mystical formula only the google gurus have the key for.  Analytics breaks down my blog into mathematical language that is probably valuable if I cared about making money.  But since my Life has proven its unwillingness or lack of interest in making money, I sort of stopped worrying about what numbers mean.  I got money in my pocket or I don't.  If I don't, then there's always the credit card.  And by using it I will ensure a steadfast adherence to my Life's will to not have any money.

So I have this fancy gadget I barely looked at over the past few years.  It doesn't care if I ignore it.  It patiently does it's job, day in day out crunching numbers and having them ready to report at a millisecond's notice.

My habit would be to check Analytics when taking a brief breather from writing posts or reading posts.  I would open it up and look at all the numbers, graphs, pie charts and what not and say to myself,  "Oh look 30 people stopped by yesterday."  And then I would leave.  But like any good habit, I broke it as soon as I could.  I stopped checking at all.

It had been maybe a year since I last checked Analytics.  I opened it up and I was surprised to find that my daily average had jumped from 0 to 30 or so hits to over 100 hits a day.  There were even some days that cruised into the stratosphere or my stratosphere of over 200 hits a day.  And instead of the same 30 people from 3 countries, I had been visited by at least one person from 68 countries. 

I have no delusions of grandeur.  I know my blog is not shaking the World.  In the scheme of A-B-C ratings of blogs, mine probably sits somewhere between P and Q.  But it did pump a little more P.S.I. into my already inflated ego. 

I only bring this up because yesterday.....no make that Saturday........1,124 visitors swung by my blog.  And then Sunday, Life returned to a normal 106 visitors.  The dynamics and flow of my Analytics graph are all screwed up now.

I wanted to find out what suddenly caused 1000 people more than normal to check out my blog on the same day.  So I dug deeper into the belly of the beast and was immediately lost as I tried to decipher page after page of where the hits were coming from.  Direct traffic, referring sites, Search engines, who knew, who cared.  My suspicion is that a post I wrote over a year ago caused this.  The spike coincided with a snarky comment on Wingers with Woodies.  But then I have only my gut to rely on and my deeply seeded mistrust of those evil doers from the Right.  Far and away that one post accounts for over 70% of my traffic.

One post out of almost a thousand posts  A post that was my usual nonsense, nothing I worked very hard on.  I wrote it to tweak noses and apparently I did.  The comments keep coming.  And most of them are concerned over the obvious photo shopped image of one of their sacred talking cows.

This Blogosphere is indeed an odd world.