Technology, Web Traffic | featured news

Google recently added a new feature on Analytics - graph annotations. It's a small feature, and I had to do a double-take to make sure I wasn't seeing things when I first saw it. You can click on any date in the graph and make a note that you can make private or share. Below the traffic graph, there's an ajax arrow that you can click on to make annotations or see a list of them. It looks like the feature only supports notes on a day in the graph and not a range of dates. It's a helpful new feature. If you launched something new on your site, you can annotate it to see how it affects traffic.

A new tracking code from Google Analytics was released recently. GA is a free web traffic reporting tool that let's you track how many users are viewing your website. The new code snippet uses an asynchronous process, meaning your site would load up without having to wait for the tracking code to finish executing.

Recently I've updated the Alexa Sparky add-on for FireFox 3.0, which displays website traffic rankings on the status bar. It's a nice little plugin that not only lets you see how large other sites are, but it also helps improve your rankings a little bit. After updating the add-on, I started noticing some strange behavior while browsing the web.

Rupert Murdoch, and a couple of his fellow newspaper-owners, say that traffic coming from search engines and aggregation sites are worthless. They call it "drive-by traffic." These users only come, read one article and then leave. For an industry profusely bleeding users and revenue, you would think they wouldn't be so discriminatory when it comes to users consuming their content.