Google Analytics

A couple of years ago, I dusted off and restarted a blog in order to have a place to post library program and storytime ideas to share with my Twitter network. In the last 6 months or so, I have begun to think about being more active in the blogosphere itself. In other words, I've been using the blog as a place to put content that doesn't "fit" on Twitter, but there are lots of children's librarians who don't use Twitter at all, and share ideas completely via their blogs. Some of these folks have been linking to my blog from theirs, and I have been curious about what kind of traffic my blog gets separate from Twitter, so I could return the favor and be more linked in to that group.

So with my husband Bill's help, I installed a plug-in on my blog that would allow Google Analytics to gather statistics about my blog traffic. It's been up for a couple of weeks now, and it's been very interesting to start to learn about how people find my site, what they are searching for, where they are visiting from, and what they look at. I know this is the same thinking that Digital Services uses when they are looking at ALD's websites, so I appreciate the glimpse at the process.

One of the things I do on my blog is upload pdfs of flannelboard patterns that people can then download and print and use in their storytimes. Since they are documents and not pages, Google Analytics doesn't keep track of how many people click on them. However, as I read a little more, I learned that there is a piece of Javascript code (a scripting language for the web) that I could add to the html for the download link, that would allow Google Analytics to count downloads as page views. Very cool!

I know that Tales' Treehouse uses pdfs for the kids' coloring contest, so I checked with Alyson Corcoran to see if she knew this trick. She said they were already doing something similar, but it was fun to check!