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.

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Published:: 1.15.08 / 10am

Category:: Browsing, Linux

Schalken 1.15.08 / 10am

How can 45.66% of your visitors use Safari when only 42.77% use a mac? Maybe some of the Windows users are using Safari?

Hardly any Mac users use Safari, let alone Windows users. It just seems incredibly odd for it to constitute almost half of your visits.

Carsten 1.15.08 / 10am

Maybe your statistics just show, that feedreaders (web based or applications) are unusually unpopular for Mac and Konqueror users. Or that Mac and Konqueror users are following the link towards your page (to read or leave comments maybe) more often.

That’s always the problem with data, you have to interpret it somehow…

Philip Stubbs 1.15.08 / 10am

They are statistics! You are not supposed to believe them

schwuk 1.15.08 / 10am

@Schalken: I agree that the numbers are strange. I’m guessing some of the Windows users are using Safari and both iPod and iPhone users will be included in there as well.

@Carsten: There’s lots (and lots) of different ways to interpret the data. I was just very surprised by what I saw.

mrben 1.15.08 / 10am

Yeah - there’s something a bit skewed about those stats. Especially with 0.58% showing up 3 times across the 2 stats.

I certainly always read through planet.lugradio.org so I won’t show on the stats.

NJ Hewitt 1.15.08 / 10am

It does seem very odd that Epiphany (or whatever the GNOME browser is) doesn’t feature, for this being on Planet Ubuntu.

I read through Akregator, so I think that this tab I’ve opened in my feed reader will count as Konqueror.

Jonas 1.15.08 / 10am

Well, there is a further problem. I don’t know how popular Konqueror is compared to Firefox overall (I certainly prefer Konqueror but…), but even if I normally would have used Firefox this post most likely is counted as a Konqueror hit.

That’s what anything using KHTML technology (in my case, akkregator, a very popular KDE feed-reader) reports itself as whenever it opening a feed in a new tab or window. That’s what I see on another blog that shows the identity string before the input fields at least.

TheBlackCat 1.15.08 / 10am

There may be people using noscript in Firefox. I specifically block google analytics and google syndication using noscript, so that may very well mean I am not detected.

Nathan Dbb 1.15.08 / 10am

Perhaps your Firefox users all block the Google Analytics scripts. It is really easy in Firefox. It is also easy to set the user agent strings in Firefox and Konqueror.

schwuk.com

Target Market?

MPB (Most Popular Browser)

Operating Systems

…and there’s more

Not A Metric

85.7% of statistics are made up

About this entry

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