Traffic Goals

Build­ing web­sites is fun, but what is the point if nobody goes to them? I’d love to increase my traf­fic but it is hard to get moti­vated or track progress with­out a goal.

So to give myself a goal and to help encour­age myself to pro­mote my sites bet­ter, I’ve set up a lit­tle fea­ture on this blog that will auto­mat­i­cally pull my Google Ana­lyt­ics stats (using some code by Chris Hope) for some of my sites and com­pare the traf­fic to the web­site for the com­pany I cur­rently work for (listed as “base­line”). My goal is to get more traf­fic for each of my lit­tle side projects than my employer gets to their fancy uber-expensive website.

This fea­ture is located above the list of books I’m read­ing in the col­umn to the right. As you can see, my Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor is absolutely demol­ish­ing the com­pe­ti­tion by receiv­ing an astound­ing 2,435% of the unique vis­i­tors that the base­line receives. Not too bad!

How­ever, The Awk­ward Tur­tle isn’t doing so hot at 1%. This poor lit­tle guy is per­haps too awk­ward to get going, but I’d love to try so that is why he is on the list.

Why doesn’t it list actual traf­fic num­bers, you ask? My goal isn’t to embar­rass or hurt the com­pany I work for, but rather to help moti­vate myself to do bet­ter. The actual num­bers are com­pletely irrel­e­vant to that goal.