Google Analytics is really awesome! It tracks all the visitors to my website and gives me nice reports about the audience, the pages they are viewing, and the means they used to get to my site. It’s completely invaluable for website owners and administrators!
BUT … the pageview data is not normalized. Google lets me choose the date range and then it shows me all pageviews for that entire date range. Even for pages and blog posts that didn’t exist during part of the date range. This un-normalized pageview data is totally unfair to the newer content! It’s not fair to compare 1,000 pageviews for a page that’s been around for 5 years to 1,000 pageviews for a second page that’s only been around for 5 months! But this is how Google Analytics displays the data.
While looking at the all-time top content on my personal leucht.com website recently, these were the all-time top pages or posts:
- My Yard Shed (static page) (19,914 views)
- Dr Seuss Nursery (static page) (15,978 views)
- Gravity Boots on the Cheap (blog post) (13,655 views)
- VOB File Fixer (blog post) (11,444 views)
- Annie 2001 at Cocoa Village Playhouse (static page) (10,632 views)
But when I took into account the birth date of each page, I got different results. These are actually my most popular pages. Not the list above.
- VOB File Fixer (blog post) (8.9 views per day since created)
- Batmobile Pinewood Derby Car (blog post) (7.2 views per day since created)
- Gravity Boots on the Cheap (blog post) (4.6 views per day since created)
- Booger Bushings For Your Car (blog post) (4.2 views per day since created)
- My Yard Shed (static page) (3.1 views per day since created)
I’m not surprised by the VOB blog post being in the number one spot. I get a lot of feedback and people thanking me for posting that one. But I’m really stoked about the Batmobile Pinewood Derby post being my 2nd most popular post! That one was not on the radar in the initial Google Analytics report!
So please, Google … please figure out a way to decide when each page got created (by looking at the first hit, maybe?) and then show me the pageviews per day over the life of each page. That way, I can see the all-time velocity or all-time popularity of each and every page on my site as a fair comparison regardless of the age of the content.
Thanks for listening,
Kurt