The World Without Altgate
No, this blog is not going anywhere. I was just looking at the 2008 Google Analytics data for Altgate. It is an amazing tool. I wish I had installed it when I first created this blog, but alas I
didn't so I only have data starting in February of last year. It's mildly disturbing that Google gets to keep all of that data, but I suppose it's a fair trade since the service is free.
Overall, 2008 was a great year of growth in traffic. At the beginning of the year, there were just about 500 unique visitors per month and by December that grew to nearly 10K. There was a similar growth in terms of RSS subscribers, finishing with about 750 (although Feedburner "lost" about 400 of them this morning which I assume will be "found" tomorrow).
One metric that jumped out at me is the global reach. I was amazed to discover that of some 200-ish countries in the world, there has been at least one visit from each except for just 77. Sure most of the traffic was from the US (about 73% of total unique visits) but there was also traffic from all kinds of places like India (2.3%), Germany (1.5%), Australia (1.4%), Slovenia (0.7%, who knew!) and Israel (0.6%). Below is the complete map of the countries still without a visitor to Altgate…if you know someone there send them a referral! I'll update you all when I get the list of those without Altgate down to a dozen or so.
Afganistan | Haiti | Rwanda |
Barbados | Honduras | Saint Kitts and Nevis |
Benin | Iraq | Saint Lucia |
Bhutan | Kazakhstan | Samoa |
Bosnia & Herzegovina | Kiribati | San Marino |
Burkina Faso | Korea, North | Seychelles |
Burundi (Urundi) |
Kyrgyzstan | Sierra Leone |
Cameroon | Laos | Solomon Islands |
Cape Verde Islands | Lesotho | Somalia |
Central African Republic | Liberia | Sudan |
Chad | Liechtenstein | Suriname |
Comoros | Maldives | Swaziland |
Côte d'Ivoire | Mali | Tajikistan |
Dem. Rep. of Congo | Marshall Islands | The Gambia |
Djibouti | Mauritania | Timor-Leste |
Dominica | Mongolia, Rep. | Togo |
El Salvador | Montenegro | Tonga (Nukualofa) |
Equatorial Guinea | Mozambique | Turkmenistan |
Eritrea | Myanmar (Burma) | Tuvalu |
Micronesia | Namibia | Uzbekistan |
Fiji | Nauru | Vanuatu |
Gabon | Niger | Vatican City |
Georgia | Palau, Republic of | Yemen |
Guinea | Papua New Guinea | Zambia |
Guinea–Bissau | Paraguay | Zimbabwe |
Guyana | Republic of Congo |
Lastly, something that Google Analytics doesn't do is allow you to see where visitors are going when they leave your site. You can see which page they left from but not where they went. This feature is rumored to be in development but I couldn't get it even with the custom reporting. Anyone have tips on this?