[BlogSite.019] Interesting "Referring URLs" from search engines

I mentioned in this post about sitemeter reports on 8/8. In the past few weeks, I found the "By Referrings" report the most interesting as it tells you where people came from.

From all those "Referring URLs" I am most interested in those from search engines. Which shows what your visitors were looking for when the search engines listed your site as one of the answers. So far I have found the following ones from Google and Yahoo:

• Search for "back yard excavation costs gosford" from www.google.com


• Search for "australia downlight fire" from www.google.co.uk


• Search for "building concepts with foam waffle pods" from www.google.com.au


• Search for "raked joint photo" from www.google.com


• Search for "keeping daily weather data" from www.google.com


• Search for "2007 model 2 storey house plan" from ph.search.yahoo.com


• Search for "house building from ground up" from uk.search.yahoo.com

If you have setup some report for your blog, you can check how did your visitors found your site as well. Have a look at the referrings URLs reports and search for URLs from search engines, you might get some interesting ones!

[BlogSite.015] SiteMeter got reports as well!

May be you already aware of this, I just discovered this about half an hour ago...

I was talking about all those wonderful reports you can get from Google Analytics the other day on this post. About half an hour ago I accidentally clicked on the SiteMeter counter on my site and I found that it provides some reports as well!

Yes, all you have to do is click on that SiteMeter counter and it will bring you to a SiteMeter site with all the reports.

This has a totally different concept from Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you have to logon to their site to see those reports, therefore the reports are only available to the site owner/administrator. While the SiteMeter reports are available to all visitors. Well, there's no right or wrong with either option, just depend on how you feel which one is more suitable for you.

Again, I have included a few reports for your reference. First, the summary report.

This report shows the location of recent visitors.

This report shows the referrals.

This report is quite interesting, it predicts how much traffic you might get for the next hour/day/week/month based on the current figure. I think it's quite fancy but not much use.

This one shows number of visits by days.

This one shows visitor details, check if your ISP is listed here...

Finally as usual, you get a world map. I specifically used the Australian map. You can see that we actually have more visitors from QLD/VIC/TAS than NSW, that's interesting!

[BlogSite.014] Have you tried Google Analytics?

I have inserted Google Analytics code to my site on the same day as I started using the SiteMeter counter in end of May. As Google Analytics doesn't provide any visible counter, I simply forgotten about it.

I logged on to Google Analytic today for the first time since May and was surprised to find that it can provide so many reports, and it's free! With SiteMeter although it provides a counter, you won't get any report like this unless you upgrade to the fee paying version. I will post some of the reports here for your reference. Hope you find it interesting as well.

First the overview, it shows you the graph (Note: you have to change the time period, it defaults to 1/7 - 31/7 when I first started), number of unique visitors, number of visits, ...etc. Quite helpful.


Next is the "Loyalty" report, more than 50% only visited once or twice... Well, it's the Internet world, what sort of Loyalty are you expecting??


Next is the "Depth of visit". As expected, most people only look at the first page...


Next is the "New vs Returning" report, looks like we have quite a lot of happy visitors that are willing to come back.


Next the referring site shows where visitors came from. I found it quite interesting. Most of the users came from homeone.com.au. Got a few from bestbuilder and my city2surf page as well.


Finally, is the country one, quite interesting to see visitors from 33 countries in the world!


Yes, it got almost everything except the counter, but since it's providing a lot more valuable report than others, you can use the free counter from SiteMeter, but definitely add Google Analytics into your blog, highly recommended!

There are a lot more reports than those I described above. Have a try yourself, you will be surprised with the information you can collect!