NH Web Design Blog

Hooked on my Web Analytics Tool

I recently designed a website for a restaurant in Prince Edward Island. Then I  checked my Google Analytics account to see if  my website had more visitors coming from Canada.

In case you’re not familiar with it, Google Analytics is a free web analytics application that can help you track visitors to your site. To use its services, you first need to sign up for an account at Google. Once you sign up, they will ask you for a domain name where you want to keep the tracking code. Next, you copy the tracking code from a text box area and paste it in  the source code of all your web site’s pages that to you want to track . Be sure to paste it into the body section of your HTML code, immediately before the closing body tag. Then you can go to your Google analytics account and see how popular your web site is.

The Map Overlay

The map overlay is one of its greatest features. The darker areas on the map show where your website visitors are coming from. To get a closer look at an area, you can click on a specific part of the map. If you click on the United States, you will see different shades of green for each state. No color means no visitors. New Hampshire is the darkest green in my map overlay. That is an expected result since that is where my web design studio is located.

I took a closer look at Canada after I finished that restaurant website. It showed up as a yellow-orange color. The bright orange spots show where your visitors are concentrated. I was happy to see that I had a large orange dot covering the Prince Edward Island area. After studying some of the other analytic tools, I could see that my number of visitors had increased from last month.

At the same time, I noticed the pale green section on the top right of the map. At first glance, I didn’t recognize that it was actually Greenland and not Canada at all.

A Geography Lesson for a Web Designer

I stopped to study the map. I hadn’t realized that Greenland was such a gigantic area and that it was so far north.

I decided to surf the web and discovered that the population of Greenland is predominantly Inuit and there is 24/7 darkness in the winter. I also learned from Macrohistory and World Report that Greenland is the world’s largest island and is about 80 percent ice-capped. According to the website,  34.5 percent of Greenland’s population accessed the internet in 2002, compared to only 4 percent for Russia. So there may be some computer savvy people there. But the country’s total population is under 60,000 inhabitants even though it is more than 3 times the size of Texas.

Perhaps because the official language is Greenlandic and Danish, I have not had any visitors from this fascinating country to my web site. But, I learned a little about Greenland thanks to my Google Analytics map. I even found a blogger, The Boundary Waters Blogger, from Greenland.

If you want to add Google Analytics to your website, here is a great blog with information about how to get started: Google Web Analytics Blog. You will learn interesting statistics about your website and you might enjoy a little geography lesson at the same time.