Target Market?
Cartoon courtesy of Hugh MacLeod.
It would seem my assumptions about the target market for this site are a bit off.
I skim through my report from Google Analytics every day or so to observe traffic, but I had a bit of a closer look today and noticed something interesting: Safari is the most popular browser to view this site.
Here are some of the more pertinent figures:
MPB (Most Popular Browser)
Considering the typical content I post here, I would have assumed that Firefox would have been by far the most popular browser. How wrong could I be? Safari and Konquerer rule the roost, while Firefox and Internet Explorer share the bottom rung.
Operating Systems
This one is more reassuring – Linux is only just behind Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows is lagging behind both of them. I was surprised to see iPod (presumably Touch) and iPhone making an appearance though.
…and there’s more
It appears widescreen is popular these days with 1280×800 being used by a quarter of my visitors and 1440×900 by ∼15%. Unsurprisingly 24-bit colour is the most popular by far.
∼85% of visitors read a single page and move on.
Not A Metric
All these figures are obviously skewed for two reasons:
85.7% of statistics are made up
I switched to Google Analytics when they first opened it up, but prior to that I used a local package (AWStats I think) for reporting on my server logs. I think I may re-enable them – or try something else, suggestions are welcome – to get a better view of my traffic.
In a future post I’ll do the ever popular “search keywords” summary.
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look good
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
How can 45.66% of your visitors use Safari when only 42.77% use a mac? Maybe some of the Windows users are using Safari?
Hardly any Mac users use Safari, let alone Windows users. It just seems incredibly odd for it to constitute almost half of your visits.
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
Maybe your statistics just show, that feedreaders (web based or applications) are unusually unpopular for Mac and Konqueror users. Or that Mac and Konqueror users are following the link towards your page (to read or leave comments maybe) more often.
That’s always the problem with data, you have to interpret it somehow…
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
They are statistics! You are not supposed to believe them
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
@Schalken: I agree that the numbers are strange. I’m guessing some of the Windows users are using Safari and both iPod and iPhone users will be included in there as well.
@Carsten: There’s lots (and lots) of different ways to interpret the data. I was just very surprised by what I saw.
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
Yeah - there’s something a bit skewed about those stats. Especially with 0.58% showing up 3 times across the 2 stats.
I certainly always read through planet.lugradio.org so I won’t show on the stats.
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
It does seem very odd that Epiphany (or whatever the GNOME browser is) doesn’t feature, for this being on Planet Ubuntu.
I read through Akregator, so I think that this tab I’ve opened in my feed reader will count as Konqueror.
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
Well, there is a further problem. I don’t know how popular Konqueror is compared to Firefox overall (I certainly prefer Konqueror but…), but even if I normally would have used Firefox this post most likely is counted as a Konqueror hit.
That’s what anything using KHTML technology (in my case, akkregator, a very popular KDE feed-reader) reports itself as whenever it opening a feed in a new tab or window. That’s what I see on another blog that shows the identity string before the input fields at least.
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
There may be people using noscript in Firefox. I specifically block google analytics and google syndication using noscript, so that may very well mean I am not detected.
15 Jan 2008 10:55 am
Perhaps your Firefox users all block the Google Analytics scripts. It is really easy in Firefox. It is also easy to set the user agent strings in Firefox and Konqueror.