From which countries do people visit ItinerantWitness.com?
From which countries do people visit ItinerantWitness.com?
Last August I set up Google Analytics to track visitors to my website. It has some great features and graphics in addition to the standard stuff everyone wants to know, the number of visitors and pageviews of the site.
Since ItinerantWitness.com is a travel blog, I find it interesting to see from which countries people come to the site.
Geo Map Overlay of ItinerantWitness.com by Google Analytics for the month of January. Click on the map for the full-size graphic.
Most people come from Europe, North America, and India, and some from Southeast Asia. Google Analytics actually mapped 488 locations for the month of January. A "location" is a place, often a city.
Geo Location of ItinerantWitness.com by Google Analytics for the month of January
The above graphic lists only the first ten countries of visitors to ItinerantWitness.com. For the month of January visitors came from 56 different countries, including Japan, Sweden, China, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Argentina, Uganda, Croatia, Russia, Reunion, and Qatar. A couple of months ago someone was visiting from Mongolia.
Most visitors come from the U.S., with India a nearby second. U.K. visitors find the site, as do people in Thailand and Ireland. This makes sense because people I know are from the U.S.; many travellers are from Europe; and I have written a lot about India and some about Thailand on the site. There are visitors from Southeast Asia because of its proximity to India, and in addition the internet is ubiquitous and heavily used in Asia, as opposed to South America for example. The fact that it is an English-language site also heavily influences from which country it is visited.
I look at the visitors and wonder how they ended up at my site. When I first started it, only people I knew knew about the site. I could look at a location and figure out which of my friends had clicked on the site. Now most people arrive at the site through a Google search. They are looking for specific information and my site comes up. I do occasionally receive an email from a regular reader who found the site through the internet. For me that's an exciting thing about the internet; people can find you from anywhere. (It's exciting if you want to be found.)
The Google searchers are often looking for accommodation in a specific place. I would guess that many of the visitors in India and Thailand are travellers searching for information about the next place they are going to visit. But I think I have some nationals in these countries discovering the site also.
I can see the search phrases people use that bring them to the site. They are often place names or guesthouse names. I try to be specific and spell correctly when I put these names in a blog entry so that it is more likely to be found. Sometimes people are searching for strange things, such as "eve teasing holi". "blog india swingers": Doubtful you'll find any useful information about that on my website! (Now that I've put it in a blog entry, I'll get a lot more search requests for it! Ack!)
There are more kinds of information than that available: for example, user network domain names (think: your internet service provider or your company's domain name). Be careful, Big Brother is watching you!
From which countries do people visit ItinerantWitness.com?
