If you always access your site from a static IP (like your church LAN) it’s far easier to exclude that IP from your stats tracking. Of course, that means you won’t be measuring your pastor’s and church secretary’s visits to your blog, but it’s a lot easier to do that than to muck around with your browser headers.

Also, some time back you experienced some templating problems that made your site look funky to MSIE users. That could have had a “chilling’ effect on some visitors. And, if you still have any persisting problems, it could be one reason why the “leading” browser is a lower on your stats than the superior FireFox. Not necessarily the case, but it maybe worth looking into.

Your stat on a six-second read time seems unusually low to me. Are you sure you’re not getting a six minute average read time (which, on the other hand, sounds high). It’s true that Web readers are surfers, but it probably takes six seconds for most folks to just to load your page and get started reading. (According ti ITScales it took 8, 9, and 10 seconds to load this page right here the three times I tested it. Try it yourself and see what your times are.)

[Whoops, looks like you already caught that. Well you may find the itscales too useful anyhow.]

As to shorter posts getting more comments vs. longer posts, in my experience it varies. On my site, the posts with the most comments are quite lengthy. (Seriously, see my wp-stats page for the most-commented posts). If you have an audience that is overwhelmed with information, maybe shorter posts will generate more interest. However, it’s whether you hit a hot-button in your audience that really determines commenting activity.

BTW, another good metric to track is your “Conversational Index” (CI). Your CI is the ratio of posts to comments. (I messed mine up a long time ago when I imported 400+ “church history” items into my blog.) My current CI is (# comments divided by # posts) is 1,433/676 = 2.1. Anything over 1 is good. The higher the better.

Finally, you’ll find even more stats gooeyness here:

Counting WordPress: Statistics WordPress Plugins by Lorelle on WordPress

Enjoy!

Rich

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll share my stats summary, too:

62%: Internet Explorer – 3,605 visits
31%: Firefox – 1,777 visits
04%: Safari – 204 visits
02%: Mozilla – 136 visits
01% Opera – 44 visits

They each view nearly two pages apiece (1.84 page views on average) and they each spend almost two minutes on my site (00:01:59 on average). My bounce rate is 73%. And most of my visitors are new: 81%.

Now, before you jump to solid conclusions about the quality of your readership, Cynthia, you have to determine who your readership is. More than likely you’re interested in the return visitors, the people who either read your blog through the feed (which you’ll know little about if you’re providing a full-text feed) or who come to your site to actually interact with content.

Your actual loyal audience consists of the return visitors (to the best of Google’s ability to determine). They may or may not be prodominantly FireFox users. If your site is like mine, anywhere from 70-90% of your daily traffic will be provided from search engine referrals. If they glance at your page (for six seconds, apparently!) and bounce away, they’re not really reading. And their browser stats are nearly irrelevant for you. (Except insofar as you need to make sure thay can actually read your site.)

So, for example, if I click on the Visitors section in the left-hand navigation bar, then click on Browser Capabilities, and then click on Browsers, I’ll get a breakdown of user activity by browser-type. And I find something interesting:

0.17% : Netscape 2.30 pages
30.68%: Firefox 2.23 pages
62.24%: Internet Explorer 1.70 pages
3.52%: Safari 1.49 pages
0.09%: Camino 1.20 pages
0.76%: Opera 1.16 pages

It turns out that even though Internet Explorer is more popular among all the visits to my site, the people with FireFox tend to read more pages.

The caveat here, though, is that I use FireFox myself, and I could be inadvertently driving up my own usage stats for this browser type.

The only reliable way I know of to exclude your own activity from the Google Analytics report is to modify your browser headers and then set up a filter to exclude that header type from Google Analytics’ reporting.

To modify your FireFox browser headings, install the “User Agent Switcher” plugin. Create a new browser-agent. I recommend just creating one slightly different from a conventional FireFox user-agent, because you don’t want to get inadvertently blocked by websites that test for known user agent strings.

To exclude your custom User-Agent from Google Analytics, log into GA and click on “Analytics Settings” in the orange bar near the top of the page. Click on Add Filter in the gray bar at the top of the filters table. Click on the “Filter Type” dropdown box, then choose “Custom Filter” as your option. You’ll get a list of options to choose from then.

Choose the “Exclude” radio button. In the filter field you’ll wan to choose “Visitor Browser Program” or “Visitor Browser Version” depending on how you modified your browser referrer. Then enter the string for GA to look for to exclude from it’s reports.

Google Analytics / Urchin is probably the most comprehensive stats tracker I’ve ever seen or used, and it’s a case of information overload most of the time. The redesign has helped.

That said, I still use (and pay for) a sitemeter account because I usually want to just quickly see who the new referrers are and I don’t want to wade through GA to find that out. StatCounter is also nice, but I stopped using it because I already use Sitemeter and GA.

I have some more thoughts on stats tracking here, if you’re interested:

Blog Stats: Get your info-jones on with weblog traffic metric

Regards,

Rich
BlogRodent

[Is anybody noticing that my longer posts are disregarded and my 60 seconders get comments. Guess that verifys the theory - bloggers are scanners.]

Anyway, Paul, I too, use a statcounter but it seems G A can do everything short of read the mind of the visitor. That’s next. After Google buys Apple we’ll just put it on the iPhone.

Can someone jump in and tell us what all GA can do?

i’ve been using statcounter (a fine, free statistics gathering javascript) for years, but I see more and more people using G.A.
does google analytics provide browser versions?

I Opera, therefore I am…less common.

-T