You are being watched

When I started this blog almost two years ago, I almost immediately hooked it up to Google Analytics.  Google Analytics provides an amazing amount of data about you, my readers.

I recently did a little study about who reads this blog using that tool.  I gathered up information about the top 500 network sources hitting this blog, and then segmented those sourced into 9 categories:

Network:  These sources are communications companies providing internet services to the general public.  Included in this category are also hotels, libraries and other methods of public access that I could clearly identify.  About 55% of all visitors come from these sources, and account for about 70% of all visits.  After figuring this out, I threw out all these sources, since this pretty much tells me nothing about the readers as I cannot tell where they readers are employed.

Vendors:  This includes anyone remotely identifyable as selling IT products for the healthcare industry.  Vendors account for approximately 40% of the remaining visitors, and also for about 40% of all visits.

Universities and Research Organizations account for about 20% of non-network visitors, and 15% of all visits.

Healthcare provider organizations include about 15% of the visitors, and 15% of the traffic.

Governmental agencies include a little less than 15% of the visitors, and a little more than 20% of the traffic.  There are fewer readers in government than elsewhere, but they seem to be paying more attention.  I am certainly heartened by that statistic.

Payers, Quality Organizations, and a few odd ducks account for about 10% of visitors, and a little less than 10% of visits.

The smallest group are consultants, and these range in size from 5-10 person organizations all the way up to 1000+ person organizations.  They account for 5% of the visitors to this site, and about 2% of the traffic.  Basically, the consultants are not paying much attention to me.  I'm not sure of what to make of that.  Some of them get quite a bit of my feedback directly, and don't necessarily need to read this blog to know what I think.  The rest probably don't care.  I'm not sure what to make of that, but I'm not losing any sleep over it either.

If you've done the math, you realize that my percentages don't quite add up.  There are rounding errors (I rounded to nearest 5%).

Many, many years ago, when I worked for a "free magazine", we used to have to publish annually a Controlled Circulation report.  This blog is "Free media", so you can consider this my controlled circulation report. Magazines produce these reports so that their advertisers can be aware of who the audience is.  I'm producing this report not so that I can advertise (see the new policy page), but so that both you and I know who is reading this blog.

     Keith

P.S.  An amusing anecdote:  While reading through the list of networks being used to access this blog, I discovered that a couple of governmental agencies reading it are in the intelligence business.  It seems it was my turn to watch the watchers ;-)