In 2005 Google released Analytics, a product to analyze website traffic.  Like most every other product Google offers, it’s free, better than the competition and has become the de facto standard in its class.

Through Table XI, I have access to analytics reports for a number of web properties, several of which receive hundreds-of-thousands of visits per month.  None of these however, have captured my attention as much as the 300 visits received by the wedding blog I launched three weeks ago.  In these three weeks I have learned more about Google Analytics than ever before for the simple reason that traffic just means more when you can put a name on each of the visitors.

Let’s take a look:

This overview tells us that 207 unique visitors have visited our blog.  In actuality, the real number is a bit lower — if I visit the site from my laptop and then visit it again from my iPhone, analytics has no way of knowing it was me both times.  But for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that one absolute unique visitor means one person.

What do they do when they get here?  On average, a visitor reads 2.8 pages in two minutes and 27 seconds.  However, 49% of the time a visitor will land on our site and bounce right off of it, only looking at one page during their visit.

These 207 people accounted for a total of 308 visits.  We can see that 67% of visits are new visits.  Another way of looking at this is to say that 33% of the visits are return visits.  This stat is of particular interest as it tells us how many people found the site interesting enough to come back for a second, third and fourth time.  We can break this down even further through the visitor loyalty report:

Who are these people and where do they come from?  Unsurprisingly, most of our visitors come from Illinois, New York (Rachel’s home state) and Indiana (my home state):

However, we were surprised to have garnered visits from 28 states:

Rachel has a brother in Alaska and my parents were vacationing in Hawaii when we launched the site so we knocked out the two most difficult ones right from the start.  For no reason other than my own vanity, I have a goal of getting visits from all 50 states by the time we’re married (without doing something like purchasing geo-targeted adwords… though it has crossed my mind).

We were even more surprised by our international visits.  We had to scratch our heads to figure out who we knew in in the UK, Australia and Japan:

We realized that our lone visitor from Japan must be Hizuru Yamamura, an exchange student Rachel met while studying abroad in Germany after highschool.  Rachel hasn’t seen Hizuru since 2002.

Hizuru visited the site once, and read eight pages in five minutes.