See who sees your site, and who reads your blog!

 Today's Trinket is more of a behind the scenes tool for teachers, and is probably for more advanced users. But feel free to ask questions of me in the comments!

Ok, I am a huge Goog-a-phile. They have so many things that are teacher friendly, and have really changed the way I use the internet. My latest favorite is Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track traffic to your site or blog. Web Analytics is a new up and coming field that looks and where people are looking at your site, how long they stay, how many repeat users you have, what pages they look at, etc. It's pretty simple to use, and very entertaining! 

For instance, a day after I started this blog I saw that I had 13 unique visitors to this site, which was viewed 20 times! That means that some of those 13 people went to my blog more than than others (let's call those people my favorites). I can also see that there are people in Mountain View looking at it (want to hire me yet Google?!) and also people in Illinois. The average time on the site is 2 minutes, so I know I need to make my posts short for their attention span, but it looks like people are reading it! 

So, sign up (you don't have a google account yet! Oh my! Get one NOW and turn your life around!) and put the code they give you into the HTML (lots of webpage tools or blog tools have a spot where you can "edit html", find that and stick it in - don't worry, it's invisible to everyone else!). Then watch the graphs, see if your children look at your site, and think about maybe how you can improve based on this info.

Any other ideas? Leave some comments for others to read!