Larry in-particular is partial to a slice of the analytical stuff

So having assumed my little baking stunt was a one-off foray into the world of SEM and blog popularity I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find my cake atop Google’s official analytics blog. So I thought it was time to go a bit meta and investigate the whole thing. Google didn’t exactly give a full in-depth account of my activities, which turned out to be ideal really. People were coerced into investigating my sugary creation to the full without realising it. People truly are wowed more by icing and baking than any ridiculous cardboard construction or wrap.
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Everything is impossible until someone does it

So your blog is ticking along nicely at 2-3 visitors each day. People don’t stay long. Many have got there by mistake through mistyping the URL, some are not even human and read the content you slaved over purely as a means of helping others consider not reading it when it appears in search results. This is a common complaint and surely the reason behind why many bloggers pack up and go home after a short time, leaving poorly thought through crusts at the arse-end of the internet.
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Content Management System Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This weekend Clarkson and I decided to build a cake based on the Google Analytics dashboard. It was a fairly complex construction that ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. It was based around a Waitrose Lemon Drizzle cake recipe, with lemon butter icing filling. I actually had to bake three separate cakes. One for each layer of the main body of the cake and another to use for the 3D elements on the top.
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Shrine to signal strength

I can never get a decent signal on my mobile, well not enough to download email or view webpages quickly. Perhaps I am too impatient, easily irritated or just unlucky? I have decided none of these apply, since 3G is one of the most ridiculous marketing ploys since the inception of pyramid selling schemes and the ability to charge £3 for a ringtone.
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iPhone: A poor man's print-screen

I have only been tapping out rambling nonsense on Twitter for a matter of weeks and only with any real regularity over the past few days, but already I seem to be appearing fairly prominently in Google. Clever me.
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I mentioned briefly before that I had failed to get Omnitures ClickMap working but today I had a flash of inspiration and had another go. It is fairly well documented how it fails on the latest version of Firefox, but IE7, surely they would have fixed that? They had, I hadn’t restarted due to my alternative stance on environmentalism. Idiot!

So what is the fuss about? Web Analytics is all about the creative display of information and ClickMap (plus other providers in the field ie CrazyEgg) goes one step further to show your data in context of the page being reported. This is tremendously powerful because the insight drawn from this visualization of user behaviour can far better drive intelligent design decisions than any graph or scatter chart.

I could see straightaway that the most popular links were not what I expected. People do not particularly like large images and instead head for text links. The horizontal navigation was popular as indeed was the footer. Unbelievably it appeared that people were clever enough to know what they wanted and were not being swayed by fancy design. It is worth noting here that this is unlikely to change my choice of background images. They are here to stay. Sorry.

Then I delved in further. Perhaps I can identify trends over different times as the design changes. Hmmmm problems. No matter what range I selected I never got a click figure above 1000. Even when looking over a year period. I tweeter my frustrations and was surprised to hear back rather randomly from OmnitureCare. They were obviously trawling Twitted for negative tweets or messages that indicated that customers were having problems. This really is an example of fantastic customer service. I had already exhausted Google and forums and every other type of search worthy of my time. So getting answers directy from Omniture was exactly what I needed.
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