Cirrusblog Analytics

Remember the days of web pages with hit counters in the shape of car odometers? It would be a bit embarrassing to show them these days, yet the interest to understand what traffic your pages have remains strong. Actually, it is a key consideration for commercial sites. My playing around showed me how difficult it is to come up with meanigful results, distinguishing between hits, visits, unique visitors, originating countries, etc, etc. But I should have known - the master of the web search, Google, has it already in an easy-to-use form, called Google Analyics. I implemented this during delivery, and can show some first results now:

Some 300 unique visitors came to this blog about 1600 times over the last two weeks. The highest visitor activity occured when Cirrus was struggling in bad weather, some 150 visits per day. Since Cirrus' arrival several dozen people are still watching the blog (a special hello to you!). A good number of you are probably sailors, as our weather page is some of the favorites among you!

You also get some rough ideas about where your visitors are located, though you don't get more detail than regional analysis. Predominantly they are from the United States, most from CA, closely followed by HI, plus others from a total of 23 US-states. Next in line is Germany - someone there is hammering the blog; wish I'd knew who that is ;-))  - and then in order of frequency of visits:  Canada, Portugal, American Samoa, Brazil, UK, Panama, New Zealand, Colombia, Peru, Taiwan, Thailand, Mexico, Australia.

Who would have known. Welcome to everyone, wherever on the world you may be!

I have a wish : during the race we on the boat have no access to fancy web analysis, all we can see are the comments to the blog, which are being transferred back to us on the boat. I want you to speak-up, so to say, and cheer us up by posting comments. Of course you can do it anonymously, if you prefer, but seeing a name with a comment makes it even more enjoyable for us.

Aloha, Ulli