This is an article about a vomitorium and how money can be made by people just like you and I by getting a little dirty and mastering a poorly practiced art. It’s called data mining.

In the old days of the Roman empire, the great chefs of Rome all had to start somewhere and where they started was the vomitorium which oddly, it exactly what you might have already assumed … it was a place for guests to vomit. See, the Romans loved to drink and loved to eat so much that they’d excuse themselves from the party and head off to a small room and force themselves to throw up.

Pretty gross.

The room was usually just off the kitchen and the top chefs of Roman culture would then go through the vomit of their guests to determine what foods they should be cooking. I guess you could say that it was a little like modern retail inventory control, by looking at what had been expelled they knew what products the guests ate and in turn what needed to be replenished.

These days I don’t think you’d find Ramsey or Oliver poking through the remains of a guests sick but I’ve worked in enough kitchens to tell you that a waiter would get thrown out of a modern restaurant if he didn’t show the chef what a customer didn’t eat during a busy dinner order. It’s not as effective as the vomitorium but a little more social.

On the web we have a similar capacity to look at what our guests are doing on our site and what they’re not doing. The fancy name is Analytics and it’s all about looking at what a customer is doing, what they’re not doing and what we (as the web content provider) is doing wrong.

thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/web-stats-improvement.jpg" rel="lightbox[roadtrip]">To the right is a real screen shot from the last month of traffic to my website. The blue circles represent the total number of visitors I’ve received each day over the past month and the blue line connecting them helps show the dramatic curves. This would be impressive enough if my website only received dozens of visitors but it receives thousands of visitors every day, so a spike of this measure is an amazing bonus for me but it’s more than a nice pat on the back, it’s a data mining dream and just like the chefs at a party I’m busy combing through thousands of new visits to determine what (if anything) I can do to improve my website for future visits.

First, I look at the hourly reports created by the WP Stats plugin it’s free and it’s timely. To be honest I have no idea how often it updates but every hour I pop over to my stats counter to review four key performance indicators:

1. Total Traffic – this tells me how I’m doing overall
2. Top Posts and Pages – what are people reading
3. Search Engine Terms / Referrers – how did people find me 
4. Clicks – what did people do once they read my content

With that information in hand, I look at the posts I’ve previously written but have not released (I’ve always got about 75 articles in reserve) and much like a comedian on stage, I try to determine which articles will be most helpful on certain days.

Next, I look at the Google AdSense data for my traffic. I do this at least three times daily, it tells me a few things. First it tells me if I’ve made money but it also acts as a verification method on the data provided by WP Stats. Often the plugin reports ~10% more traffic than AdSense, not sure why but the two reports combined tell me what I need to know.

At least once a day I look at Google Analytics for the day previously and compare my notes to the results. Again I look at the total traffic, how people found me etc. but I also look at unusual spikes in traffic and a geographical breakdown in traffic. This week? I’m huge in Russia, Texas, California and New York … what does Vermont have against me?

So what does it all mean? Maybe I just have too much time on my hands or maybe I’m too obsessed with my website but I don’t think that’s the case, I think by keeping a close eye on what readers are after it helps me refocus and ensure I’m reaching the maximum number of people. For example … last week I launched a new website called seocheck.getawaygraphics.com that I thought would be pretty popular but only 15 people have been to the site in 10 days vs. over 100 downloads for my latest WordPress plugin since last night.

What does your data say about your website visitors?