Keeping track

When you have multiple Web blogs, it's fun to see how many people are showing up and what they are doing when they get there.

It's easier than you think. You see, every move you make is being tracked by Google Analytics, thanks to a code in the heading. For example, there have been 3,713 visitors to this blog in the past year, and 297 in the last month -- but only nine yesterday.

The best part if discovering where they go during their visits. It's tough to know why a page gets a number of hits. For a while, Google used to use the pictures on the travel site in its index, and I got a couple of dozen hits per day that way. All of a sudden, I dropped out of the data base, and the totals dropped.

The analytic counter doesn't track those who just come to the site generically, but it does count hits to specific pages.

For example ...

On this site, the most popular visiting spot has been the story I did on what WEBR Newsradio 970 graduates are doing these days. It's had 41 hits, well ahead of the post on mall stores.

At the Sports Book Review Center, the most popular review is "Fasten Your Seatbelts," a book about Van Miller. That's not a surprise since it's a local book that wouldn't get any national reviews. It's tied with Best American Sports Writing 2009, which I posted on Facebook.

At Road Trips!, the page on Letchworth State Park dominates for some reason. The Christmas light show in Disney World is second. Oh, the McKinley assassination site in Buffalo is fifth.

And the Hockey Abstract site has had one particular stat on top of the list for months and months -- oldest active players. Nothing else is close.

It's tougher to check out the Bandits' history site and Braves' history site, since the pages are less specific. But, it's interesting that the Braves have been gone since 1978, but still get many more hits (right now, seven times as many) than the Bandits.

There are many tricks to get people to visit your sites. This is another of them.