Being dragged inexorably along, I now have several days of Google Analytics information on my 4 web sites. My friend Carl showed me how I could go directly to analytics and find out all sorts of things. There are things like pageloads, exits and uniques which I assume are counts of how many people have gone to each of the pages of each site. I can find out where in the world these viewers were located: France, India, China and several eastern European countries as well as the US. I could even find out that the 2 hits in the US were from Indiana (and that they were me or my friends here where we are visiting grandchildren!).
Knowing what information can be obtained is interesting, but knowing what to do with it is another matter. I’m told I need to establish goals for the sites. If I am honest, the only goals I had were vague desires to find groups of people with the sort of interests that would make them eventual customers for the books I am writing or else customers for the publishing services I can offer. Nothing will be sold directly from the site, so a big part of the information available is irrelevant. Right now I am in the See Spot run phase and some day I hope to graduate to The Hardy Boys or War and Peace.
When I ponder a little more I realise my main goal is to find people with similar interests and have conversations about the things we love: Sailing, embedded microcontroller development, Scripture study, and photography/publishing. If any of these fit you, PLEASE send in a few comments (did I mention that Analytics reports page loads for many of my posts as being zero). They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I fully expect that web sites fit the same model. All the analysis information in the world could only tell me that things have not yet taken off!