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.

My site traffic increased over the course of the day while I tracked the figures using a mixture of GA and Flickr stats. The Flickr stats were particularly good since they are updated far closer to real-time than GA. Unfortunately you cannot drill down into much detail so can only really rely on headline PVs and some other crumbs.

A poor man's Google Analytics for pictures

The next thing I did was to google for “Google Analytics cake” to see how the rest of the web had responded to my cooking (though mostly icing) skills. Typically there were a few tweets throwing people in the direction of said curiosity. Tragically they were mostly to the google blog rather than my own… They were thanked nonetheless on the off chance they found more treats of note amongst my array of blogged about trinckets. The most reliable search here was to filter on the past 24 hours and various little morsels cropped up. Found one blog hosting the picture on their own server with no track-back to either Google or my blog. I couldn’t comment since their commenting functionality doesn’t work.I would usually put this down to robot activity if there hadn’t been some human crafted throwaway prose attached. James Wallace and co will hopefully learn how to credit people for their work in later posts. The cake was only his third post. Still maybe it’s better to get the image out there than to try and get any control over it.

Another unexpected side effect of this analytics equivilent of a prime-time TV spot was a large increase in comments and even one user of my contact form. Brilliant. There was a sort of cryptic can-you-help-me-make-website request, at least I think there was. Will have to wait and see if they get back in contact to clarify what they are after.

One user managed to single handedly up the average pageview per user count to over 6 in Austrailia. He was one of the few to appreciate the cardboard stuff. So in summary, I am not sure if I have really answered the original question. I guess the rule to live by is, if they come for cake then give them more cake. Clearly a gap in the market here. Thinking cap firmly on for related mini projects here.