GeologyRocks

I thought I'd answer a few questions that no-one has asked (apart form me). How many people visit geologyrocks? How do they arrive? How long do they stay? Where are they from? I use two tools to tell me this inormation: google analytics and webalizer. The data I'll use here is from February, a short, but otherwise typical month.

How many people visit geologyrocks?

We average around 250 visitors per day or around 6-7000 per month. These are visits from different IP address and will include visits from web spiders, such as google. In terms of actual people (taking into account dial-up users who have a different IP adress esch time they dial-up), my estimate is that we pull in around 100 people per day. The numbers fluctuate with day of week and time of day. Weekends are the quietest and a weekday afternoon is the busiest time.

How do they arrive?

The majority (over 66%) arrive via google searches, both regular and image searches. The rest are direct (bookmarks or the URL being typed in), wikipedia and other search engines. I think this demonstrates how important it is to be google friendly. Luckily being google friendly also means being user friendly! How long do they stay? You can answer this question in terms of time or the number of pages visited. The avergae number of pages viewed per visit is 4. Most visits last less than 10 seconds: they are clearly people searching, hitting the site and then bouncing back to google to continue their search. A fair few visits are more than a minute. Combined with the low page hit suggests to me that visitors are therefore reading the page they land on at least. This can only be a good thing!

Where are they from?

This one is easy to answer: the western countries! Most visitors are from UK, North America and Europe.

What does this all mean?

Ok, in this bit we go from hard data (ok, I did some speculation above), to pure speculation I'm not 100% happy with the above figures for a number of reasons. I am happy with the way that the site is growing, the numbers of visitors is increasing over time. However, the above results do explain a few things about the site; mainly why the forums are quiet and there doesn't appear to be a lot of activity (say compared to other forum sites where there are tens-hundreds of comments/topics per day, whereas it is usually in single figures here). The majority of people are arriving via google, searching for stuff, they quickly scan the site and then go back to google. This is how I search; if a site looks promising, I will go to it, scan it, quickly assess it, then either stay or leave. At the moment people tend to leave What are people searching for? No real surprises there: geology seems to be the most popular search.

The above table show that when people search for "geology" they stay for an average of 9 pages. Search for "artisan well" they stay for 1.2 pages. This makes sense. Folk actually searching for artisan well will land on the glossary entry for artisan well or a page that contains the term. So how do we make GeologyRocks more desirable to stay for longer? One way, in my opinion, is to make more use of the content we have here (which is great, by the way - unique, trustworthy and well written). I think automatic linking between tutorials, images, articles and the glossary is one such way. I also think that fixing some of the bugs (that have been bugging me, never mind you lot - very sorry about them by the way ) would go a long way to help too.

I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts - especially if you arrived by google

Also, if anyone has a google account and wants access to the GeologyRocks tracking data, let me know and I will arrange access.