It helps me to do in-depth Web Analytics if I can take a real case - like my own blog - Webmetricsguru.com - rather than talking about generalities - I'll focus on my Audience in this post - my first post took the top keywords that drove traffic to Webmetricsguru.com this year (2006) and focused on how well the keywords converted on the G1 Goal of visitors clicking on an AdSense Ad.

My steady audience is about 10,000 visitors during any month - people who keep coming back again and again to read what I post (this chart covers all year and we started tracking in March 06 - so there's about 9 months of data here).   I would almost state - it's probably the same people who are coming the third time, forth time, fifth time and so on - it a real audience and we know from FeedBurner - there's well over 300 Subscribers to the XML feed for Webmetricsguru.com.

Jumping over to Quantcast - to fill in where Google Analytics can't (unless Google buys Quantcast and merges it with Google Analytics - something I suggested to Brett Crosby at EMetrics Summit last October - QuantCast would automatically pick up Geo Demographic Data and add it to the Web Analytic data - hint - hint).

The problem is, Quantcast does not have much data on Webmetricsguru.com yet - but if we were to compare my audience with some other well known Web Analytics sites like Omniture.com (can't find another that has enough Quantcast data) - maybe we could get an overall sense of the audience of this blog until Quantcast catches up with me.  Again - this data is for Omniture.com - not WebMetricsGuru.com - but hopefully, Quantcast will catch up with me the rest of the web analytics blogs.

Siteographics™

Specialty Retail	Index
hallmark.com	567

Nov 2006

Common Audience

Site	Score
windowsmarketplace.com	645
www1.hp.com	125
search.microsoft.com	104
software-files.download.com	104

Top Subdomains

Subdomain	% who Visit

sitecatalyst.omniture.com	8.6%
omtr.omniture.com	1.7%
corp.omniture.com	1.6%

And a little more than 2/3 of my audience is from the United States (no surprise)

What's intriguing is my visitors from India, China, Hong Kong, Romania and South Africa convert the best in terms of a G1 Goal of clicking on an Ad (not shown in the chart) and Google Analytics allows me to see what terms and posts they converted on.

For example - here's the main keywords from India, and those that converted.

Maybe a third of it is paid traffic - but the rest is a long tail - a very long tail.

I think is would be really, really great if Google bought Quantcast and got the psycho-graphic data - when you consider all the sites that Google Analytics tracks - a really rich mosaic of data would be added to the web data we're collecting here.

And that's the problem - most web analytic data is not indicative of the audience - I've been working on this problem at IBM and specifically on the US Homepage - and it's no easy task - that's why I think my idea of merging Quantcast with Google Analytics is the way the go, in my opinion.

This is enough information about Audience for one post - I'll see what more I can pick up about Webmetricsguru's stats in an upcoming post.