I don’t blog as much as I once did. Social media sites provide me with quicker ways to interact with a more targeted group of friends/followers/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. Plus, let’s face it, rattling off a tweet or a Facebook post is a quicker and easier path to the endorphine hit of computer-mediated human interaction than composing a blog post. My contributions on Facebook and Twitter are, like most people’s, brief and informal. In a very profound way, social media has brought to the rest of the world what blogging brought to a very small subset of internet users back in the day. And that’s a good thing, ultimately. While the signal-to-noise ratio is worse, there are clear benefits to having more people at the party.
Though the way I run Wheatblog would surely give SEO and social media expert the willies, I do occasionally delve into things that site owners generally should care about, like Google Analytics. A quick dive into the site statistics for Wheatblog.com, for the past month, reveals some interesting things, to wit:
- The most popular language among visitors is US English (81.98%). No surprise there.
- The most popular Country/Territory is the US (51.75%). The UK comes in second (9.74%).
- The most popular city (a new category in Analytics) is London (3.76%). I’m considering “Friend of the British People” as a new tag line.
- The most popular browser among visitors is Internet Explorer (48.78%). But it only accounts for about half of visitors. Chrome (23.82%), Firefox (21.34%), and Safari (2.29%) round out the top four. This is quite a big change from years past, where IE ruled supreme before being seriously challenged by Firefox. As you can see, Chrome is now IE’s biggest contendor, but Firefox is still holding a nice share of the market.
- Most of you are still running Windows (92.87%). You poor bastards. I can only assume you’re surfing from workplaces where you have no control over your own destiny. Fellow drinkers of the Apple Macintosh Kool-Aid come in second (4.29%).
- As for mobile platforms, most of you are surfing via an iOS device (58.98% of mobile devices, 1.02% overall). Android users account for 41.03% of mobile devices, 0.71% overall.
And what do all you fine people want to know? Or, to put it more bluntly, why did Google send you here?
- The vast majority of you (49.46%) want to know where that damned Microsoft Excel Personal Macro Workbook lives on your operating system. I feel your pain.
- A sizable chunk of you (6.29%) want to know how the NZ() function works in Microsoft Access.
- Almost as many of you (5.55%) are doing research on deploying Microsoft Access 2007 databases in SharePoint 2007.
- I’m proud to say that 4.13% of you came here in search of my Adobe Captivate AS3 widget, PauseMeNow.
So, there you have it. Based on my quick trip through Google Analytics, I ought to devote a lot more of my time to answering Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access questions (that’s called “targeting”). And I should put banner adds everywhere so I can “convert” those interactions into cold, hard cash. Maybe I’ll do that. Or, then again, maybe I won’t.