Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

The site was launched in December last year, and I've already reported you on the first month. Here is what happened in January:

In January, some new features such as RSS feeds, 3 new question types and the Friday QuizDay newsletter were introduced. But what is different from last month is that there were no Google or other advertisements to drive traffic to the site. I wanted to test the 'residual' visits after promoting it one month, and just rely on the blog, visitors own promotion and Friday Quizday flash. It was not bad. Statistics come from the free Google Analytics service.

- The site had a total of 1392 unique visits (down from 1512), 65% of them new visits and good for a total page view of 9282.

- There is a lot of variation in visitors per day. The high peaks are not there anymore because there were no Google ads this month. The average is around 45 daily visitors, with peaks of 80 or more. In the weekends there is a drop in visitors. The Friday Quizday flash has effects on Friday and Monday.

- Visitors stay on average 4 minutes, but there is a 58% bounce rate (only visit 1 page)

- Browsers: IE is still the most used browser with 66%, but that is a 7% drop by last month.

- 61% of people find us via Google.

- There were 19 new members, some of them got really active on the site. This month we also had the first quiz in German.

- The numbers of questions and quizzes increased significantly. We went from 225 to 522 published questions!

- The top 5 of visiting countries: Unites States, Belgium, United Kingdom, India, Netherlands.

- The Hall of Fame after two months:

Name	Accuracy	Points	Member since	Country
QuizMan	53%	988	16 Sep 2007	BE
Dailydog	85%	872	23 Sep 2007	BE
bert_decoutere	62%	759	09 Sep 2007	BE
Stijn	73%	542	02 Sep 2007	BE
elgotes	69%	385	16 Dec 2007	AR
Kareltjeslimmerik	58%	210	13 Dec 2007	BE
Popol	78%	194	18 Sep 2007	BE
belandje	67%	137	27 Jan 2008	BE
shubhox	69%	108	20 Dec 2007	IN
monnu1380	73%	85	21 Dec 2007	IN

Labels: about2findout, analytics, google analytics, statistics

The site launched a month ago with the AIDS Day Quiz. As I used Google AdWords to promote that quiz, there were about 80-90 visitors a day. Later it dropped back to 20 per day and went up again around the time the Christmas Quiz was launched. That one was promoted again via AdWords, and linked in my Christmas wishes to everyone. Biggest hit was on December 21 with 145 hits. Yesterday on Christmas I had 70. Here are some statistics from the first month of the site, provided by the free service Google Analytics:

- I had 1512 unique visitors (83.10% new visits) that viewed 12745 pages.
- That is an average page view of 7.06.
- People stay on average 4 minutes 36 seconds on the site.
- 47.37% only visit one page.
- Browsers: 73.91% use Internet Explorer, 22.99% use Firefox.
- I had visits from 106 countries. The top 5 country list is: USA, India, UK, Belgium, Canada.
- 32.24% is referred via Google, 23.38% via advertisement
- I spent 62.71 euro on Google AdWords advertising, and got 710 clicks for it. My add showed 410.392 times.
- There are now 225 published questions in the database
- There are now 59 registered members
- The Hall Of Fame after one month:

Labels: about2findout, analytics, google adwords, statistics

I signed up for the free Google Analytics service. It helps you to track all kind of site statistics such as how many hits you have, what pages are the most visited, where users come from, how they found your site and the browsers they use, etc. How it works is pretty simple. Sign up for a free account and paste a small script in the HTML code of all your pages just before the closing /body HTML tag. That's it. The goal of Google Analytics is to optimise web sites for advertisement revenue, but it provides very useful insights for any webmaster.
I've included the script on the master page of my asp.net application so it is automatically present on all pages of the site. It takes 24 hours to get the first reports so I can't tell you yet how the reports look like, but judging from the free tour they seem powerful yet simple. There is also a Google Analytics blog available.

Labels: analytics, asp.net