Awate.com’s Performance According To Google Analytics

Over the last few years, google Analytics has improved so much that managing and studying the statistics has become a task on its own. Though we looked at it lightly for many years, we never used it extensively due to access and other technical problems that we encountered. But since March of this year, when awate 7.0 was launched, we are using it extensively to help us get insights about the visitors of awate.com, their geographical location, their ages, the type of device they use to access the website, the time and day of the week they visit, their behavior, and many other indicators that help us plan to deliver our content effectively and efficiently.

In reality, such tools of information are supposed to be internal, management tools not meant for public consumption. But this time, we decided to share this information with our readers, if not for anything else, to satisfy their curiosity, and help them know how their favorite website if doing and so that they relate to the general readership of awate.com. Please note that we will not commit to reporting such statistics on a regular basis.

Generally traffic is slow during the summer, but this year, it has been somewhat close to the traffic volume of the other months.

This report contains information collected since 7.0 was launched in February 2014. While most of the stats cover the period from March 30 – August 31, 2014, others cover the period from March 1 – to August 31, 2014.

Overall, the number of new visitors to the website has been steadily increasing and for the reported period, it amounted to 27% compared to 83% returning visitors. We will work hard to maintain the flow of new visitors to achieve even a larger coverage.

We feel some of the salient facts that you will discover in this report are surprising! How many of you can guess the female/male ratio of the visitors of awate.com?

The gender percentage of awate.com visitors is: females, 45.85% and males, 54.15%.

Another promising and significant information is the age segments of visitors: 61% of our visitors are under 35 years of age (18-24 years: 27.5%; and 25-34 years: 33.5%). 55 years and above make only 11% of our visitors.

But the most significant fact in this report is that during the last six months (March 1, 2014 – Aug. 31, 2014), awate.com served 2,199,316 pages, and its visitors had a total of 1,087,271 sessions (March 30-Aug. 31, 2014).

Visitors to awate.com are spread over 53 countries (during the covered period); they live in all time zones and continents—that is excellent for the spread of traffic because when some are sleeping others are surfing the website, and that helps ease the pressure on our server and helps the speed of the website. Details of the 53 countries is shown in the table below, and here is the monthly breakdown of the Pageviews:

March   390, 657
April      364, 836
May        417, 461
June       370, 114
July         334, 977
August    321, 271
Total:      2,199, 316 pageviews

Site speed is also of great importance to us and we are very careful not to upload large files and images taking into consideration the difficulties that our visitors from countries with slow Internet connections and bandwidth limitations may face. This page, for example contains many images and though the images are purposely made with low resolution,  it will take a longtime to load in places like Eritrea. Still, with all of that, countries like Eritrea and Ethiopia have extremely slow connections compared to many countries. Sudan has the best connection compared to the countries of our region.

Here are the six slowest and six fastest countries and the average page load time in seconds (this applies to awate.com only)

The Slowest Countries

Eritrea: 238.67 sec.
Sierra Leone: 160.38 sec.
Algeria: 138.19 sec.
Ethiopia: 100.29 sec.
China: 79.51 sec.
Sudan: 69.96 sec.

The Fastest Countries

Hungary: 3.68 sec.
Taiwan: 4.55 sec.
Switzerland: 5.48 sec.
Sweden: 6.14 sec.
Spain: 6.96 sec.
Singapore: 7.18 sec.

Compare the above speed to that of the USA, where most of the visitors of awate.com are; the average page loading time in the USA is 8.73 seconds, just slower than that of Mexico, Canada and Japan respectively.

Thanks to google Analytics which provides us with a myriad of tools to measure our performance, we are able to gauge the preferences and problems in any part of the world.

On this occasion, we in the Awate Team would like to thank all our visitors for giving us their trust and for being loyal to this website, and we thank the team of columnists and featured writers who regularly enrich awate.com with invaluable content. We would also like to thank all members of the Awate Forum for making this website lively with their passionate and intelligent debates—all the goal of seeing a free, prosperous Eritrea that is at peace with itself and at peace with all its neighbors.

Thank you all.