Random and occasional thoughts on

In most sports, numbers are used to analyze everything from a baseball batters performance to the percentage of free throws a basketball player makes. In businesses, managers will use numbers to analyze their profitability as well as well as to identify profitable products and markets. I have likewise been trying to balance what I am interested in with what the people that come to my blog like to see. To that end, earlier this year, I implemented Google Analytics to track statistics on my visitors. Don't worry I do not track any personal information about anyone stopping by here (I don't even think I can) but rather just information about how many people, what part of the country or world where they are logged in. So how did I do for 2008? 1332 Visits 18 countries 41 states 80 posts I started blogging in May, but started doing it a bit more consistently in July. Also by July, I had gotten most of the kinks worked out of Google Analytics so the numbers above are not comp...

I think that the statistics for the past 30 days for my little blog are pretty interesting. I have had visitors from 10 countries: Australia Canada Czech Republic France Israel Latvia Mexico New Zealand United Kingdom United States A while back I had noticed that I had a visitor from Finland. I have no idea who it was, but I thought it was an interesting coincidence since my Mom is full-blooded Finn. In the USA, I have had visitors from at least 33 states. I say "at least" because there are several that are listed as "not set". Maybe this can be my first "50-state club" and I can get people to visit from the missing states. The western-most states that I am missing are Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico. If you know anyone in those states, see if they will drop by once and represent their state. I'll update the tally soon and see if this might work. Next time I'll list all the missing states and see if any of my loyal readers can help me fill in ...

I was looking over my Analytics report for my blog today and this proves how smalltime this little blog of mine is. I've had 300 visits in the past 3 months (Jun-Aug). To be fair to myself, I have not been very active in keeping things updated and active and I've posted less than 10 entries each month. I hope to break that this month, but won't go all Twitter-like and blog that I'm having lunch or sitting in a meeting waiting to escape or anything like that in order to get my post count up. You can be sure that if I post something, it is important or interesting or funny to me. Hopefully, some of these will also strike a chord with you. On the flip side, during the same 3 month window I did have a visitor from Latvia and so far in September, I've had visits from Finland and Australia. I know who the Latvian and Australian folks are but have not figured out who dropped by from Finland. Pretty interesting though since my mother is full-blooded Finn.

I have now gotten my Google Analytics account up and running. I edited the layout template for my blog and added the code where I needed to. I verified things were working fine. Then, the next day ... NO DATA. ARRGH ! I went back into my layout template and the code has again been moved. If it is this hard to get this working within the Google family, how hard must it be if the site you are trying to monitor is somewhere else. Is there something in blogger that goes out on a regular basis and "cleans-up" blogs or is there something else that I can do to make this work? I really want to be able to get a better understanding of how GA works and this blog is the best place for me to do it. Any suggestions?