If I just label my evening's activity as a substitute for boredom would I appear less vain?  I was checking out the coopersoft.posterous.com website stats on Google Analytics. Initially I was double checking that I hadn't checked the posterous counts, which are non-unique page views against Google Analytics unique page views. Nope, I had it right. Shucks.

But I lingered there.  I stopped. I stared. I began to dig around in the reports. Using Google Analytics you are able to see quite a bit about visitor traffic on your website. Here is a graph showing Top Content (pages hit the most) since I hooked up Google Analytics to the website.

Pageviews, Unique Pageviews, the Average time a visitor spends on a web page, Bounce Rate, the available information goes very deep into your website's traffic stats.

Sometimes you might read articles or hear something about how much someone can know about you while your looking around on the internet. For instance, with the traffic information I have from Google Analytics or other traffic reporting services it might be suggested that someone knows your hair color, or what you are thinking while visiting their website.

Hair color, no. What you are thinking?  Possibly, but more as it relates to your opinion of their website. Did you stay, and for how long.  Did you leave the website after viewing the page you started on, or did you travel to 4 or 5 other pages on the site before leaving. Is this your first time visiting the website, or have you been here 20 or 30 times before.

More important to a website owner than that might be how the total website traffic averages for all of these questions.  When a new article is posted, do 50% of the visitors that land on that web page leave?  Or do they like it enough to stay for a few minutes on that page and then look around at what else is here?  If they stay and look around, the new post is pleasing to the audience that finds it.  As a webmaster, you probably want to know that.  

During my poking around, I started wondering about what I could know about just one visitor. Just for kicks, really, but it also might prove helpful when one of us is the visitor to know what can be known as we wander someone's website.

Just in a couple of minutes of looking, I spotted something,  Yesterday, someone who has never been to this site before, browsing the internet with a Macintosh, using Safari as the broswer, from San Francisco, using Comcast for their internet provider came into this site directly, not by searching or a link on another site, visited 7 different pages in 44 seconds. They were mostly the frilly pages.  The Dolphins blowing bubbles, The Wunderland Train, The Dude Check out the Moon Video.

This seems to be about what you can know about a given visitor using Google Analytics. If this person in San Francisco was you:\

I know who you are.  I know what you had for lunch.I also know what you did last summer,  And it's gonna cost you.