motivated by data
When I started this blog, I signed up for Google Analytics and started collecting data to get a sense of readership.
My overall impression of Google Analytics: it provides a lot of data without yielding much easily accessible information. Finding out, for example, how the visitor from Serbia came across my blog involves doing a bunch of drilling down which is tedious and time consuming. I'm aware of products that help translate Google data into more meaningful results but, for now, I think that these are a bit excessive for my purposes.
If anything, Google Analytics has proved to be very motivating. First of all, it's great to know that people from across Canada and all around the world are actually visiting the blog and reading my posts. Not all readers comment so, without Google Analytics, I wouldn't know that quite a few people read hyphenated on a regular basis.
Secondly, I have observed a direct correlation between new posts and number of daily visitors. Naturally, visitor numbers drop off if I don't post regularly and so I make an effort to keep the posts coming to maintain readership. That's not to say that I only post to drive up traffic (I enjoy the writing a lot), but seeing a graph trending towards zero does help to motivate.
The data also can be quite entertaining, especially the information about the Google search terms that directed people to my site. As I tweeted the other day, it appears as though my blog is being mistaken as a grammatical resource for those interested in the appropriate use of the hyphen.
