[Donald Schneider]

If anyone reading this note has a personal website, I would most assuredly recommend installing Google Analytics, this remarkably illuminating tool, or one similar to it. It was a real eye-opener for me.

My site has been averaging about 100 raw hits a day over the last one month, having grown steadily since I established it in December of 2006. For this sort of site, this seems like a lot? That's what I thought. However, after finally installing GA, I was astonished by how relatively few people constitute all those hits.

Since I established the monitoring device just one week ago, I have had about 700 hits, which includes just 96 unique hits. At that ratio, one would need about 7,500 hits a week, compared to my present 700, to have any sort of sizable readership on one's blog; say at least 1,000.

Thus, one might well be typing away, deluding one's self into thinking that thousands of people are reading at one's site, while in fact it might be closer to a hundred.

On the other hand, although my readership might be significantly smaller than I had thought, it does appear to be most loyal, as many have returned over fifty times just in the one week I've had GA.

I mention this here because I thought it might be extremely interesting to fellow bloggers who do not yet have such an analytic tool linked to his or her website.

Don Schneider