_ It is now just under 2 weeks since the new www.richardwilding.info website has been launched.  As part of the process the freely available Google Analytics has been used to monitor the site.  Information including the number of hits, detailed demographics including the town, country, type of computer, make of mobile telephone, time spent viewing pages, entry and exit pages are monitored and analysed automatically as part of the free google analytics package. 

Google analytics also tracks the “journey” or flow a user takes on the website.  It sees the country and town the “surfer” originates from it then monitors each page viewed so a surfer may originate in Seatle, USA, access the home page for 30 seconds, then spend 2 minutes on the “About” page, 45 seconds reading this “blog”, then access the “downloads” and down load a file, then visit the “podcast page” for a further 92 seconds and then exits.

But what is the point of this abundance of this anonymous information and how can companies use it?