Google Information Behavior

Google Analytics allows people to see how many people are coming to their website, which sites referred them to the site, and which terms they entered in a search engine to find the site. It's interesting and flattering to find out that people from India, Australia, Russia, England, etc. have visited my site before. Of course, the vast majority if individuals viewing my blog come from the United States and Canada.

Don't worry, I have no reason to be cocky as soon as I see how long people stay on any given page. My bounce rate is too high. It does feel good to see which entries get looked at the most and for the longest amount of time. At any rate, looking at this usage data does motivate me to write more posts to my blog. The more blog posts I write, the more that people will likely see my blog

Currently, my blog is up 9.27% over the last month in number of visitors, with 271 visits who averaged one minute twelve seconds (1:12) on my site. In the last month only 9.96% were repeat visitors, indicating that a clear majority found my site via a search engine. Actually, the "Traffic Sources Overview" shows that 8.49% came to my site directly, 15.50% came from referring sites (sites with lists of information-literacy/library blogs), and 76.01% from search engines. Increasing my post frequency and quality would likely increase my number of repeat visitors.

It's particularly interesting to me to see which Google search terms brought individuals to my blog. "College reading strategies" always seems to draw several people to my blog each month. It's often at the top of my most-viewed posts, but not far behind that is my post on the difference between a catalog and an index, though the searchers often use different sorts of terms and combinations of terms to find it. Many have found my site looking for a la carte menus for library instruction. It seems that my most faithful audience out there consists of other librarians, which totally makes sense, considering the subject matter of my posts.

Quite a number of individuals have found my site by conducting various searches on the differences between the Greek gods, Dionysus and Apollo, and their philosophies.

Of the 186 searches that found my site, there were 106 searches that contained more than three words. People understand they can enter lots of words, including prepositions, into a search, and this will often yield the right kinds of results they are seeking.

The person who conducted this search "inblogtitle:"information literacy" university" stayed on my site the longest (26 mins.) and actually viewed 4 different pages. (Thank you, and I hope you come back.) It's probably a librarian or a library-science student. In second place, someone who searched on the following terms: "scholarships and grants reference book," stayed on the site for 20 minutes and visited two pages. Third place goes to the information seeker who used these keywords: "craap test worksheet activity quiz" with a time of 7:28.

Particularly for librarians, it is interesting to think about the information behavior and practice of different individuals, which reminds me that I need to go back and look at that post to remember what the difference is between information behavior and information practice.

Thank you for visiting my blog. : ) Please comment and let me know what you think.