Traffic patterns to this website

Since I’ve been on the Discover Magazine website for one year I thought I’d look at some patterns in Google Analytics. Specifically, over the interval from April 1st 2010 to April 30th 2011 (alas, I lost access to the ScienceBlogs traffic data). For example, what institutions are people coming to this website from? To do that I just filtered for “university” and “college” in Google Analytics. Below are those institutional addresses which sent 500 or more visits to this website over the year.

Now let’s look at visitor loyalty:

Here’s a chart, log-transformed:

There’s really two types of traffic to this weblog.

1) Organic referral traffic. Often search engine. These are “transients” who are picking up a “slice” of information from this weblog. They’re actually the majority. I’m cool with that. I’m a disher-of-data and on oracle of analysis. I don’t begrudge people their grab & go, I do the same.

2) Then there’s the “core” repeat readership. A subset of these are the ones who leave a lot of comments. This is the “GNXP community.” If I read the chart above correct nearly 15,000 of you accessed this weblog more than 200+ over a year. Pretty intense. Has to be more people than Paul! No offense, but I’m egotistical enough not to be super-conscious about how many people are reading me. Probably one reason I’ve used the r-word without thought!

For the nerds:

Geodata. Kind of ho-hum:

Referral stuff, sites people came from and keywords:

I’m not gonna lie, I’m always creeped out how many people search for my name. Some of them are probably looking for my content, but some of them are probably a little too fixated on the man, not the message. I don’t even want to get into the shocking number of female blogger names which come up in my keyword list (people who leave comments, people who I’ve mentioned). Also, I guess Phil Plait is a “pretty big deal”, so many people come to this website by mistake looking for him! Most of the other stuff is pretty understandable. Except for “tiger pictures.” That made me laugh.

Image credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen