Google Analytics: 2 Years

It has been 2 years since I set up Google Analytics for this blog (refer to the posts I submitted since October, 2009 to see how traffic has grown over this time period). Since the last related post 4 months ago, the number of countries of origin has increased by another 11 to reach 113.

Visitors from the top 10 countries of origin came from the United States (46.2%), the United Kingdom (4.4%), Canada (4.2%), India (3.5%), Germany (3.2%), Australia (2.8%), France (2.5%), Brazil (2.4%), Netherlands (2.0%), and Russia (2.0%). From another perspective, visits from the top 10 cities originated in (1) New York City, (2) Moscow, (3) London, (4) Chicago, (5) Singapore, (6) San Francisco, (7) Los Angeles, (8) Bangalore, (9) Paris, and (10) Manila.

As discussed in previous posts, the data continues to be heavily skewed in the direction of the United States, but the share of visits continues to move elsewhere, with visits from the United States sliding another 2.0% in the past 4 months.

An update to an earlier annotated chart I provided from Google Analytics provided below is an attempt to assess the growth of this blog in terms of visits. Other similar charts from Google Analytics are available, but except for additional variability, which is the case with the page views chart, the same trends emerge.

Googleanalytics_visits_gfesser_annotated_20091001_20111001
After stagnant growth during the first couple months following Google Analytics set up, which I show here as phase 1, greater visit variability occurs especially following the tweeting by an author of one of my book reviews, which I show as phase 2. The latter half of 2010 comprises phase 3, during which time both visit variability and volume grows, especially due to my posting of personal notes taken during leadership and technology conferences, followed by a long stretch of somewhat consistent visit volume shown as phase 4 that is punctuated by additional postings in one of my ongoing series.

The top 15 blog pages visited here are as follows: (1) Anima Sana in Corpore Sano: Part 1, (2) Copycat Advertising Campaign, (3) Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 2, (4) Switching from ASICS to Brooks, (5) Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 1, (6) Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 3, (7) Global Leadership Summit 2010 – Day 1: Andy Stanley, (8) New Book Review: "Manage Your Project Portfolio", (9) Global Leadership Summit 2010 – Day 1: Dr. Peter Zhao Xiao, (10) SpringOne 2GX 2010 – Day 2 Keynote, (11) Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 4, (12) RSNA 2010: Quality Improvement? – MRI Workflow, (13) New Book Review: "Amplifying Your Effectiveness", (14) Treadmill Maintenance, and (15) Mono in Transition; C# or Objective-C?.

My ongoing series on Liquibase in the enterprise continues to receive a significant number of visits, with the fourth entry jumping to #11 in less than 3 months after being posted. The remainder of top posts has changed very little in the 4 months since my last Google Analytics post.

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