Target Market?

Cartoon courtesy of Hugh MacLeod.

It would seem my assumptions about the target market for this site are a bit off.

I skim through my report from Google Analytics every day or so to observe traffic, but I had a bit of a closer look today and noticed something interesting: Safari is the most popular browser to view this site.

Here are some of the more pertinent figures:

MPB (Most Popular Browser)

Considering the typical content I post here, I would have assumed that Firefox would have been by far the most popular browser. How wrong could I be? Safari and Konquerer rule the roost, while Firefox and Internet Explorer share the bottom rung.

1. Safari 45.66%

2. Konqueror 36.99%

3. Opera 16.18%

4. Firefox 0.58%

5. Internet Explorer 0.58%

Operating Systems

This one is more reassuring – Linux is only just behind Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows is lagging behind both of them. I was surprised to see iPod (presumably Touch) and iPhone making an appearance though.

1. Macintosh 42.77%

2. Linux 41.62%

3. Windows 10.98%

4. Unknown 2.31%

5. iPod 1.73%

6. iPhone 0.58%

...and there’s more

It appears widescreen is popular these days with 1280×800 being used by a quarter of my visitors and 1440×900 by ∼15%. Unsurprisingly 24-bit colour is the most popular by far.

∼85% of visitors read a single page and move on.

Not A Metric

All these figures are obviously skewed for two reasons:

Most people “consume” this site through a feed reader or one of the Planets I’m syndicated to, so I never get to see (or count) them Google Analytics requires JavaScript which is not universal

85.7% of statistics are made up

I switched to Google Analytics when they first opened it up, but prior to that I used a local package (AWStats I think) for reporting on my server logs. I think I may re-enable them – or try something else, suggestions are welcome – to get a better view of my traffic.

In a future post I’ll do the ever popular “search keywords” summary.