Visitor statistics and visitor tracking are very useful features of our back-office/dashboard.
Daily and Monthly Summaries
As you can see from the following screen capture, we provide an overview of the visitors, total pages viewed, spiders, and feeds. (Record-keeping for spiders has been turned-off. The information can be refreshed at any time and results are real time. (Click on any of the images to see larger versions.)
Record of Visitors and Pages Visited
Another view shows the sequence of all recent hits and if they were referred from another page or site.
For example, look at the IP address circled in green. Someone at 198.204.133.208 searched for “swaptions primer” at Google and arrived at an archive of all posts that were tagged “swaptions primer.” (Meta-tags or keywords are one way to categorize posts and emphasize the most important terms in them.
As you can see, after the visitor read that (or those) post(s), they signed up for the RSS feed, which automatically pushes new content to their browser or e-mail program, and then they went to the blog, and then to the “Fallacies” page.
There are a couple of other very nice features of this add-in. First, notice the “+ Filter” area above the list. If the “+” is clicked, that area can be expanded and the entire database of visits can be queried to determine, say, all visits from a particular IP address.
In fact, we can tell that IP Address belongs to the quasi-government agency/firm, FNMA, or FannieMae. How can we tell? Well, we’re gald that you asked.
Whois: IP Address Information
Notice that IP address circled in red in the above screenshot. Clicking on the address generates a “Whois?” report. If the person is visiting from their residence, then most likely the report will show the visitors Internet Service Provider or ISP, e.g., Comcast or Verizon.
However, if the person is visiting from a large or medium-sized firm or organization or from a university or government department or agency, then usually that firm or entity’s name will be reported. For example, clicking on that IP address above shows that visitor was from PNC Bank and they have previously sign-up for a RSS feed.
That valuable information if you are attempting to sell to such an organization, and there are a variety of valuable ways to use that information.
Search Terms, Results and Rankings
Above we mentioned that a visitor arrived after searching for “swaptions primer.” Notice that the referring page is blue. That means it is a hyperlink. Clicking on that link directs you to the search engine’s results page where your page or post or image is listed. That allows you to see how your content ranks and provides feedback about how to adjust it to move higher.
We provide a list of the 20 most recent search terms (or phrases), but the entire history of search terms is also available, and that history is searchable and sortable, too.
Feedback on searches (and what visitors do after arriving at the site from a search) is very useful information for ongoing content management and search-engine-optimization strategies.
