I have returned from my brief journey to the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts. So let’s wrap up this series of recent posts with a final entry. As I mentioned previously, the mapping tools provided with Google Analytics simply fascinate me. Now I’ve discovered yet another use for them: recording my travels.
The Resulting Map
First, my apologies for the quality of this map. It was part of a screen grab. Then I cropped and enlarged it to focus on a particular region of the United States. This created a larger map but with reduced resolution.
Analysis
However it does tell an interesting story even though it’s a simple map, and even though it may not seem to be saying much on the surface. Here’s what one can conclude:
- I didn’t have much trouble finding Internet access as I scooted along the Gulf Coast. A dot indicates traffic to my website that originated from a given town or city. Larger dots signifying more hits. The largest blobs sit right atop Gulfport, Biloxi and New Orleans where I traveled.
- I don’t have a lot of web traffic on my site. If a single individual can skew access statistics then the base must be pretty small. True enough. I’ve designed the topic around a very narrow audience. If I wanted lots of hits I’d focused on celebrity gossip or professional wrestling. As a result I get about 100 visitors each day. So if I pop onto the site to update the blog or check for comments once or twice a day it makes a measurable difference.
- I hit the site more frequently in Mississippi than I did in Louisiana. Actually that’s not a valid conclusion. I notice when I travel away from my home that new locations oftentimes do not appear in my access logs. On a hunch I checked the IP address for the hotel network I used in New Orleans. It corresponded to a site in Henderson, Nevada. That’s about 1,500 miles off! It must have been the location of the hotel’s Internet Service Provider and the circuits must have honed to that spot. Sure enough, I had a bunch of website hits from Las Vegas and its surrounding suburbs during this period.
Simple maps tell big stories. But take care to avoid unwarranted conclusions.
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