Remember I had blogged about the keywords that people used to come to my blog (which I had found out thanks to Google Analytics).
So now that I have got time to study the Analytics application, I dug in deeper as to how much information does Google get when you use Google search or any other Google service or even arrive on any site that uses the analytics.
And I have to admit…I am amazed by the amount of things that Google knows about you, your network and even your computer.
This is the basic dashboard for the Analytics. It gives you basic information like the entire traffic to your site for the previous month, the number of visits, time on site, location from where traffic has arrived on your site and a pie chart showing what percentage of traffic came directly, came via a search engine or came via a referral site, for e.g. someone else’s blog. And it also gives the pages that people landed on.
Each section also has a ‘View report’ button which allows you to see a detailed report. The first report is for VISITOR OVERVIEW
This is the page that appears when you click the view report.
The page gives details like the number of visits, the absolutely unique visitors, the time on sit, bounce rate etc. It even gives a technical profile and tells one about the browser the visitor was using, what kind of internet connection was he using.
The right hand side shows the visitor segmentation based on the Visitor profile-language, network location or even some user defined parameters. It can even classify traffic based on the browser profile which would include the browser being used, the OS, the screen colour (16bit colour or 32 bit colour), screen resolutions, java support and even whether flash was installed on the browsers or not.
This screenshot for the flash version shows that 507 visits in the last month used 21 different versions of flash. :O
The network location gives the networks that people were using when they came to my blog. 108 different networks for 507 visits.
Next is the TRAFFIC SOURCES tab which opens up a window which list outs the sources via which people came to my blog- the top was direct traffic, while Google was a far second. Other blogs too came in the traffic sources.
For all the visitors who came via any search engine, analytics also lists out the keywords of the search. The keywords include assignments on dsp, disprin cnf, vishrut meaning, google baba, IC 814 hijack, delhi+mussoorie+yamunanagar+route, where does aziz premji live, further study after bits dlpd degree…
So if Google can release this much information to users, then I can very well imagine what they do not release. Just imagine the amount of information they can extract from a single search that one does using Google search…
