8 Years of Google Analytics

I’ve used Google Analytics for a long time. I first installed it on Muschamp.ca in November of 2005. I had installed Urchin during one of my co-op work terms while at Shell Canada. One day I got the bright idea to look at all the traffic Google has recorded. My website isn’t that popular, but most people don’t have as many years of analytics not to mention as much research into search engine ranking and keywords as I do.

I recently listed my most popular blog posts and other popular content is pretty obvious, my home page, the front page of my blog, but no one seems to believe me that the most popular single page on my entire domain given 8 years of visits is my miniature painting advice page with 82,785 visits according to Google Analytics.

I used to have the number one page on the entire Internet for Nurgle, but then this website called Wikipedia came along and I decided to stop competing so hard for an obscure keyword.

The recent drop off at the end is the result of splitting my traffic up by subdomain. My blog is my biggest and most popular subdomain but I have about a half dozen. I’m actually anti-subdomain now as they make things harder to track and measure in Google Analytics. I’m even more anti-iFrame.

Keyword Referrals

I also have close to eight years of keyword referrals in Google Analytics, though Google doesn’t like to give out that data as readily now. Mint seems to provide me with more interesting information. My most popular keyword is of course, Nurgle. The rest of the popular ones I’m less proud of, they’re not terribly useful keywords to do well for in a search engine, in some cases I’ve actively tried to do worse by removing content. But you never can tell when a baby will be born and all of a sudden your images of Prince George will become popular.

This entry was originaly posted on September 23rd, 2013, it was last edited on January 26th, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Google Analytics, Keyword Referrals, Popularity.