"Who are you?"

sabbathbloody ger vertigo gatefold inside bigIn my teens I was a devout fan of Black Sabbath (I'm still a fan, although I don't listen to any albums released after Sabotage). I used to lie on my bed and listen to their song ”Who Are You” from ”Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” in my crappy headphones and blankly stare at the ceiling. It contains this verse: ”I only have one more question/Before my time is through/Please I beg you tell me/ In the name of hell/Who are you?/Who are you?”. Little did I know that I decades later would ask the same question, but in a completely different context, namely who visits my site. Thanks to my friend Mikael (self-taught website builder and professional web analysts) I now know a lot more. He has been torturing Google Analytics until it confessed. Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Here’s a sample of interesting facts (expressed in terms of groups and average means). The visits come via desktop (63,1%), mobile (33,3%) and tablet (3,6%). The visitors can be divided in male (79,7%) and female (20,3%) visitors. I’m pleasantly surprised of the relative large share of women. I would have guessed 5% since women seems to lack the monomanic disposition which facilitates the development of obsession in music. Women have a higher bounce rate (leaving the site after visiting just one page). The bounce rate for female visitors is 75,7% and they visit 1,81 pages (on average). The same figures for male visitors is 69,9% and 2,05 pages (on average). Men tend to stay longer on the site than women (3,04 minutes compared to 1,54 minutes for women). I feel young at heart, but I’m obviously a very old man. 88,8% of the visitors are younger than I am. It’s interesting to study the statistics. Younger people (25-34 years) have the highest bounce rate, 76,6% (probably too used with impatient social media). The older group (45-54 years) visits more pages before they bow out (63,1%) and stays the longest on the site (4,15 minutes), maybe because incipient perception difficulties. Most visits come from USA (31,1%), followed by Sweden (26,4% - mostly me and my entourage), then it's a jump to Russia (5,9%) followed by Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Spain, Brazil, France and Netherlands. There are differences between continents. I'm pleased with the fact that visits come from all countries in Europe. In South America, people in Paraguay, Guyana and French Guyana don’t care much for gothic country. The same is true for North Korea, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in Asia. Africa seems to be very uninterested in my site (only visits from 11 of 55 countries). All joking aside, I think the differences between continents quite accurately captures where people with a weakness for gothic country and access to a functioning internet connection are residing. The main purpose with Google Analytics is to convert web traffic into sales. However, this have never been my goal. I also doubt targeting. In my opinion, the categorization is meaningless (music lovers, shutterbugs, travel buffs etc.). Man is too complex to be classified in that way. All statistics about geography, gender, age, groups and subgroups are fascinating, but it says nothing about you. Well, who are you? I think that you either stumbled across the site by accident and it took some time to realize that it wasn't what you expected or that you actually care for this kind of music. I choose to believe in the latter, put on a record album and blankly stare at the ceiling. Obviously, no change there.

 

 

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