One month live – some numbers to show what's going on

Today marks the one month anniversary of the new website design. Overall it's been a big success. It's cleaner, easier to use, faster loading and acts more like I want it to than the old site ever could. As well as being a writer, I've always been fascinated by numbers and statistics – yes, I do know the old joke that 93% of statistics are made up on the spot – so I thought I'd share some of the details about how the site has performed since it was revamped.

Unfortunately I'm not able to provide comparison data for the site before the change as – like the old and muchly underutilised blog – my records vanished by mistake when I made the switchover. If this post proves to be a success though I'll keep comparison data from here on in and feed it out to you on a monthly basis.

Right, to start with let's look at some figures; the redesigned site launch happened at 1.30am on Thursday 22nd September. Since then it has been visited by people from ten countries: UK, USA, Australia, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Mexico, India and Japan. Of those, the UK represents most of my visitors – almost 85%, America is a distant second with 8.2%, Australia and the Netherlands tie with 1.3% and the others come in around the 0.6% mark. This is to be expected – I am offering a service that is only of use to English speaking clients and all of my marketing has been conducted through English based media.

Of my visitors, 33% return at least once – over time I expect this percentage to rise, particularly as my blog continues to develop and I am able to begin adding additional products to my shop. An interesting point to note is that first time visitors tend to view only 4 pages on average whereas returning visitors read an average of 8 pages. Does this mean that people who click through to the site decide not to look around much? If so then it implies that I'm missing the attention of these people. This is borne out by the average time that people spend on the site: first time visitors only spend 3 minutes and 9 seconds before leaving whereas returning visitors spend an average of 12 minutes and 13 seconds here – presumably those that choose to return do so because they want to learn exactly who I am and what I do.

I mentioned that 33% of people are visiting for their second or subsequent time – let's look a little deeper than that; 13% of my visitors have seen my site exactly twice, 5% have been here three times, the percentages that have come between four and eight times are roughly 1.5% each. After that we have a jump; the start of my loyal visitors. These 4.8% have sought me out between nine and fourteen times each – somewhere between every two to three days this month. The final category are my very loyal fans, the 2% of you who have viewed my website up to 25 times. If you're one of these people, come say hi, tell me what you like so much. Maybe I'll mention you in my next summary of the site's activity.

Browsers and operating systems make for an interesting debate. I've long been aware that Microsoft is losing its battle for dominance in the web browser wars – w3schools have kept rankings on the percentage of users both for browser and OS for the past eight years. September 2008 was the month when Internet Explorer stopped being the browser used by the majority of world users, and in January 2009 Firefox took the lead with the highest percentage of users from all the different options available. They have never been able to pass that crucial 50% mark though because although they are still the most widely used browser, the growing use of Chrome has kept them from taking the overall majority. How do my visitors compare to these rankings? I would expect around 45% to be with Firefox, 31% with Internet Explorer, 17% with Chrome and to have Safari and Opera as minor players holding 3.7% and 2.2% of the user share respectively. What I actually found was a little different: Internet Explorer held the lead with 29%, Firefox came second with 25% and Chrome came in a close third with 21% of my visitors using it. Mozilla Compatible Agent and Safari both came in at 11% although this is a slightly misleading statistic as many smartphone browsers appear to be Mozilla Compatible Agents without giving any further detail. Last on the list was Amoi 8709 with 1.4% of the visits and BlackBerry making up the last 0.7%. So – breaking from global data, Internet Explorer is still the most commonly used browser for accessing my site – barely. That Chrome was so close is also interesting; perhaps Firefox is losing users to Chrome while Internet Explorer retains a loyal cadre of dedicated users? Safari's market share was much higher than anticipated, and poor Opera didn't bring a single person to my site! All this is useful to me as it reinforces the need for me to test the appearance and functionality of the site in multiple browsers. I'm aware that there are still one or two bugs to be resolved in regards to Firefox and Chrome but until now I'd never even considered testing for mobile phone browsers.

Next up is operating systems; here Microsoft shows a clear dominance with a whopping 73% of visitors using a MS OS. In comparison only 10% of my traffic came from Macintosh, 2.7% on an iPad, 2% an iPhone, 1.4% Linux then Android, BlackBerry and the humble iPod taking 0.7% each. There were a further 8.2% of you who have set your systems to hide your OS details – a figure I shall be watching in coming months.

It would seem that Microsoft have been successful with recent marketing as Windows 7 took the lion's share of visits – 41%. That means that over 56% of the total views made in the past month came from machines running Windows 7. In comparison Vista achieved 36% and XP held 22% – not bad for an operating system released in 2001! A surprise appearance on the list was Server 2003 who made up just 1.9% of visits from a MS OS. I'm quite curious to know who uses a web server to browse the internet.

Now that we know what browsers and operating systems you used, let's have a look at how people found the site. Interestingly 42% of you typed it directly into your url bars – I would imagine that many of those visits were made by people returning to the site who had previously bookmarked it, or who have seen the address listed in my book. The next most popular method for finding me, 18% of traffic, was from Facebook, 17% of you googled me and 15% followed directions from my Twitter account. After that there is a steep decline; just 3.5% of you looked me up after seeing my profile on iFreelance.com, 1.4% came from my much neglected DeviantArt page – I love you guys and I'll post some updates soon, I promise! While the smallest percentage came from Bing – just 0.7% used that to find me.

So what are the most popular pages on my site? Unsurprisingly the homepage is the most visited with 17.7% of traffic, closely followed by this blog with 16.4%. My store appears in forth position with 10.4% of your page visits. Only 6.7% of the traffic was spent accessing my contact page – the eighth most popular, and least popular were my testimonials with a measly 1.5% of the total page views. That makes for interesting reading because exactly 50% of you enter my site through the homepage – which gets 17.7% of the total traffic and 32% of you enter through the news page. The rest of the pages receive nominal and fairly equal ranking in terms of the percentage of time in which they spend as an entry page.

What does all this mean in terms of developemt? Well, it lets me see who the type of people are that visit my site and allows me to customise my marketing methods to use sites where I have a strong following to my best advantage. This in turn means that I'll need to spend less time on promoting myself and will permit me to spend more time doing what I should be doing: writing, editing and proofreading. There are a few other topics I could cover while talking about analytics, but I'll leave them for another time.

I know this has been a long read, and possibly not the most interesting for some of you so here's a deal – I promise that my next blog post will be a lot shorter and much more colourful. There, that isn't so bad is it? Until next time, keep writing, keep reading, and keep in contact!