Under Pressure at Pembroke's 100th Post

Visitors from Oxford tend to view our food blog on Fridays, viewing an average of 3.2 pages for an average of 4.5 minutes. About the same time it takes to copy and paste our weekly formal hall menu into a word document, attach it to an e-mail, and send it to their catering managers’ suggestion in-box.

Statistics are great titbits of information you never really knew you needed to know, until you knew them. Take the following nuggets of useful information I’ve learned since discovering Google analytics.

• Since launching the blog in September, we’ve had over 20,000 visitors from 39 countries.
• This weekend alone we’ve had 350 visitors from America, Canada, Australia, Romania, Chile, Brunei, Turkey, Holland, Germany and Sweden (not counting a few hundred from the UK).
• I can also tell you that 1pm is the most popular time to view the blog, and Friday the busiest day.
• Our blog has an enviable bounce rate of 43%, which has improved significantly since changing the layout of the home page.
• The top sources of traffic to our blog are, direct 54%, Google 24%, Facebook 5.5%, Blooger.com 5.18% etc, etc…..
• We've had visits from 26 of the 50 American states, with California and New York sending the most visitors.
• The Russians have visited us three times, the French only twice.
• Someone in Aruba, obviously fed up with sun, sea and sangria has visited 5 times.

A very important statistic that Google missed is the effect our blog has had on staff morale.

• The majority of the catering team have appreciated seeing photographs of their hard work displayed on-line.
• The family and friends of our many foreign staff are now able to log-on and see photos of their loved ones, as well as the fruits of their labour (the staff gallery is the third most visited page on the blog).
• The comments left on the site have shown the chefs and waiting staff how much everyone appreciates their efforts.

Today marks the 100th entry in our food blog. Founded in September as a means of highlight our sous vide cooking, Under Pressure has quickly developed into a venue for sharing comments, food related trivia and the afore mentioned formal hall menus;-)

All in all, not a bad start for our little food blog.