InsideWaMu

One of the interesting things I’m finding out about blogging is the reams of data available to track how I’m doing, who my readers are, where they’re coming from, what searches are sending them to me, how many pages they’re reading, etc.  It’s really pretty cool.  You register with Google Analytics, paste a little code at the bottom of your main page and every night at midnight they load in the data from the prior day - and it’s all free.  

Since the traffic has really picked up in the last few days I thought I’d share with you some of the data that I see, so you can get a better appreciation of who your fellow loyal readers are.  I love this stuff and find it really interesting.  You on the other hand may just find it creepy that I can know so much about you guys.

Note: I made a formatting change that goofed the tracking code for all day on July 21 - that’s why there’s no data

So from July 11 when I started to July 25, there have been 2,587 page views in 905 visits by 662 unique visitors.  Note that the huge majority has come from the last two days (averaging 300 visits and 800 page views each day)

Taking a step further, here is the breakdown of what sites you guys are reaching me from:

Check out the huge inflow from Yahoo finance message boards, especially how “sticky” they are, checking out 2.7 pages per visit and spending nearly 4 minutes a visit.  Upon further review, looks like this particular post by arenas341 on the message board is driving all the traffic.  So whoever you are arenas341 at yahoo, thank you.  You clearly know good websites when you see them.

The next cool thing is drilling in on the clicks from search to see which search terms in google and yahoo are sending you my way.  Here’s the full list, note that 97 of the 185 visits are some variant on wamu bank run.  Whoo Hoo!

The next level is - from which cities are you visiting me? 

Who knew the blog was so big on the eastern shore of Australia??  G’day you guys!  If you throw another shrimp on the barbie and set aside some ice cold XXXX or Toohey’s New I may just have to go visit. 

Also weird that there’s so much traffic from San Jose - 187 visitors - vs just 92 in Seattle.  And last but certainly not least, the visits by server/network.

So surprisingly “only” 214 visits and 648 page views from the WaMu network.  I’d have thought more, but that’s still not bad, and does represent 16 hours and 20 minutes of “work time” spent here.  Anyone willing to take bets on how long before I’m blocked from the WaMu network?  I don’t suspect there will be a mass uprising when that happens, unlike when they tried to shut off ESPN.com a year or two ago.  That lasted maybe a day or two and was when we found out just how much the guys on 31-33 floors read ESPN.com.

Also interesting: #19 TBWA Chiat/Day.  Not sure what a marketing firm is doing checking out my blog (probably didn’t like my shot at marketing on a prior post), but they appear to like the blog as a whole spending almost ten minutes per visit and checking out five and a half pages.

And how about #132 Lucasfilms. Maybe the blog can be incorporated in the next Star Wars movie if they ever get around to making #7, #8 and #9?

Among WaMu competitors I see BofA at #35 (though all bounces, meaning they closed website or didn’t further click links).  Chase is at #42 with a couple of extended visits (feel free to post guys, especially if you want to comment about this article) UBS at #59 and stopping by for one visit Astoria Federal at #72 and Puget Sound Bank at #182.

So if I want to drive more traffic I should evidently blog more about bank runs and/or post links to my website on Yahoo Finance - I guess that’s where the current critical mass of WaMu readers read.