Sum-up of my use of Google Analytics for 3 years

Avertissement

I no longer advise to use Google Analytics, and I have entirely removed it from my webpages, and I will no longer update these tutorials. As they would still be available from Google Cache or Archive.org websites, I prefer to keep this page online.

Note

This short page is focusing on Google Analytics

For more information, it might be useful to consult first one of these pages:

Quick historical overview

And so, from the last 22 Mars 2013 this website hosts pages and got visitors on a daily basis, and I have a partial access to a few statistics on these visits (cf. the first commit).

Overview of this article:

  • The next part of this article gives a small overview of these data, by analyzing quickly the main statistics.

  • Please note that this article has only been written in order to be informative and to respect my constant will to be fully transparent. This article was not meant to be pretentious, or to give any confidential information (Google Analytics only keeps anonymous data, in fact (in a weird way…)).

Main statistics

These stats have been simply summed from the data last accumulated during the last 3 years (March 2013 – March 2016).

  • 27000 visits, it is about an average of 25 visits every day (but it includes visits from web-bots and crawlers so it might be over estimated…),

  • 51000 pages served; and, weirdly, this page in French (see its translation) brings about 10% of visits, and this other one in English get about 5% of the visits,

  • and a ratio of 83% of new users vs known users.

Geographical origins:

  • 157 different countries (almost all!) in 3 years. But it’s pretty consistent, I get in average about 100 different countries (e.g., 110 in the first 6 weeks in 2016). Most of these countries sent less than 10 visitors, and 33 sent a user only once! Just 22 countries emitted more than 100 visits, and without surprise, the first 5 countries share about 75% of the visits (by decreasing order, France 45%, USA 20%, Russia 7%, India 4% and UK 3%),

  • 5 different continents (I catched them all!), with 60% from Europe, 23% from America, 10% from Asia and only 1% from Oceania,

  • 21 different sub-continents (I catched them all!), about the same repartition (West Europe got 45%, Northern Europe about 15%),

  • 3152 different cities (… that’s a lot, but there is so many of them!). The ten most important ones are « unkwown/unspecified » (25% !), Paris (7%), Cachan (France, 6%), Samara (in Russia, there is surely a web-bot or a crawler there, 3%), London (3%), Hyderabad (India, 2%), Toulouse (France, 1%), Bangalore (0.9%), New York (0.8%) and Rennes (France, 0.8%). Just on these top ten cities, we clearly see the effect on the number of visits of my current and past presence in a country or city (as I lived in Paris, Cachan, London and Hyderabad between 2013 and 2016), and from huge « high-tech » cities (New York and Bangalore), and « important spots » of the research in maths and computer science in France (Rennes and Toulouse).

Languages : French has 40%, English has 25%, « unknown/not specified » has 25% (!), and Russian, Spanish and others got 10%.

Other statistics

Browsers repartition (which follows the the global evolution of the repartition of web-browsers):

  • 52% of the users visiting this website are browsing with Google Chrome (but every one knows that Firefox is the best browser!),

  • Mozilla Firefox has 28% (sadly…),

  • Apple Safari has 10%,

  • and the rest few percents are shared by Internet Explorer (3%), Opera (2%), and other smaller browsers.

Devices repartition : laptops (90%) vs mobiles (8%) vs tablets (1%).

Mean duration of the visits : about 2 minutes (that’s about half the time to read the longest of my articles, and about the time to read any of the medium-size article hosted here, so it’s a good sign: visitors are really reading these pages!).

Referrer : Google (45%), « direct access » (42%, this includes the various anonymous search engine, mainly the wonderful DuckDuckGo), Facebook (5%), http://lbesson.bitbucket.io (3%), http://crans.org (2%) and http://www.mahindraecolecentrale.edu.in/ (1%).

More images

Have a look to this folder for a pretty image gallery, showing more examples and figures, in pictures.

Other website?

This website is the one that gets most of the visitors (on web pages written by me), but I have some pages with Google Analystics enabled on other websites: