On my blog I receive a large quantity of visits to this page (and by posting it here it will probably go up even more):
http://www.stephan-schwab.com/airtravel/vfr-ifr.html
I’ve looked at the details and I find that 95% of the visitors seem to be Americans. Their browser language is set to en-us. THAT is the reason why I post my question.
The source of the visits is almost exclusively Google search and the search keyword is “vfr ifr”. What are these people looking for? I can’t really imagine why one would like to search for just the names of these two flight rules.
Maybe you can help me with some thoughts so that I can stop scratching my head.
David is the expert on this, but I’ve been looking at similar data for my site peter2000.co.uk where I am running a simple logging program called Webaliser and this shows the top 20 (or whatever) google search strings which people used to get to your site.
I see loads of searches irrelevant to aviation (e.g. a search on Prague digs out one of my trip reports to Prague) but otherwise I don’t see any great concentration. The highest scoring search string was used 9 times (in all of November) and scored about 2% of the total searches only, and related to a very old project I wrote up in 2005. Then there are many hits on e.g. “tb20” and variations of that, as one would expect.
It does make you realise that if you pay serious money for google adwords (as I do at work) you absolutely must set up negative search terms otherwise most of your money will be wasted.
My suspicion is that if you are getting hundreds of searches on “vfr ifr” this is some runaway process.
Also en-us could easily be anywhere. Most people just install their browser as it comes.
You should be able to get visitor IP stats and then you can do IP to country analysis. All the web analysis tools do that. This isn’t perfect (e.g. with mobile data, when roaming abroad, the data goes via the cellular network all the way back to the operating base of the SIM card issuer so if you are on Vodafone UK, and are in Mongolia, your IP will be in the London area) but overall it gives you a good idea.
If you implement google analytics (virtually all websites do that) then you get much better stats, but do you care? I keep peter2000 clean – no analytics, no cookies, no referrals, no visitor tracking.
Thanks. Interesting points.
Google Analytics also shows that en-us is indeed Americans. The numbers for language and origin match to a large degree.
