I have a very controversial article that I originally wrote for Blog of Fusion. I may still post it here, but it looks like it'll be a Fusion Authority article instead. In its place I'd posting up some stats for House of Fusion as seen through Google Analytics. As a note, I'm using round numbers here. Usually rounded down.

The first and most important statistic to me is the people. Using strict Google numbers, House of Fusion has had over 825,000 Absolute Unique Visitors since the beginning of the year. These visitors are broken down into 1,075,000 visits and 1,775,000 page views. This in turn breaks down into 815,000 visitors who came once and did not return and 250,000 visitors who did. As House of Fusion excels in its mailing lists, it is expected that people don't come to the site very often as they get it all in their email.

While the site visitor information is nice to look at, it really doesn't help you that much. Lets look at some numbers for the last week that will be of use.

Of all the visitors, only 2.9% did not have Flash installed. 84% had Flash 8 or higher and 28% had Flash 9. Because I use a 95% threshold to determine if a stat covers just about everyone, I have to assume that If/When I add Flash content to the site, it should be targeted to Flash 7 or make it easy to upgrade to the latest version.

On the browser side, 61% of the visitors were using IE with over 99% of them on IE 6 or above and 33.5% used Firefox. Again, this tells me that I can code the site using as close to modern standards as I'd like. No worries about older versions of IE or Netscape. They're just not statistically significant as a sample.

Now here's the statistic that is really important to me. Only 3% of the site users are on an 800x600 resolution. In contrast, over 95% are on a 1024x768. This means I can code the UI of the site to this larger size. But wait, it gets better. A little over 43% of my visitors are using a 1024 or wider resolution. This means I have 'extra' space for content that will be seen by almost half of my visitors. Not a place to put important things like site nav, but things like latest blog posts, list threads and the like will fit here perfectly. And because it's on the page, Google will see it and it'll help raise the profile of the page.

The last statistic shows why I focus so much on Google for Search Engine Optimization and the like. Of all visits to the site, 85% are coming from a Google link. Only 5% are coming from a Yahoo link and another 5% are coming direct. This means that whatever I can do to make Google 'like' my site better, the more traffic I can expect.

I'm going to try and keep a running log of the House of Fusion stats on the House of Fusion Statistics page. This will go far in showing that House of Fusion is growing and this implies that ColdFusion is growing as well. It will also allow you to see the changes in data over time. Watching the resolution numbers shift more and more to larger screens lets you be ready when you hit your threshold and you have to do a site redesign to make use of the extra room.

For those who want to get their own numbers, just sign up for a Google Analytics account. If you can't get in due to Google being overwhelmed by responses, you can 'cheat' by setting yourself up with a Google AdWords account, which gives direct access to Analytics as part of the setup. Need to set up an AdWords account? Click on the button below: