It's always hard to comprehend the size of the internet when you can't physically see who's online as opposed to seeing exactly who's in front of you at the checkout in the supermarket, but it's becoming more and more transparent with all the measurement tools out there such as Google Analytics and our favourite at GradConnection: Woopra. The main difference between the two is that Google Analytics will show you the history of traffic on your site vs Woopra which will show you the users currently on your site, it's the difference between looking at the daily report of total customers a store manager at Coles and actually watching the customers in the store as they shop and seeing how they behave. 
It's often a challenge for us to visually portray the total amount of visitors we get on any one day, week or month to our site, the best we can do is say a number but just a number is hard to put into perspective. Being at the John Mayer concert (which rocked by the way!) the other night in the sold out Rod Laver arena of 13,000 made me think, “so that's what 13,000 people look likeâ€Â. Being that we're always checking the GradConnection site analytics I knew in my head that this equates to under a week's worth of traffic to GradConnection.com.au and about 2 hours of traffic to our friends who we share an office with Bart and Kim's American retail coupon site tjoos.com.
Graduate Careers Site Performance
Often we find that organisations career or graduate career sites go unmeasured and it's simply just the measurement of applications along with quoting where the candidate first heard about the employer that give the metrics on the site's performance. Simply putting Google Analyitics into your organisation or graduate careers site will show you exactly where your traffic is coming from and will allow you to give real measurements on the numbers coming through to your site, such as:
- Where Visitors are coming from Referring Sites, Google, Direct
- Most popular pages You'll be surprised to see it's not always the home page
- What parts of the world your visitors are from Break this down again into cities
- Bounce rate Are they finding you and leaving? Or are they hanging around?
This is only the tip of the iceberg on what Google Analytics can show you, if you're anything like us you could spend days playing around in there.
Grasping the total visitors
When you're looking at just the numbers it's hard to put in perspective exactly how many people that is and what that amount of people would look like, whether you're looking at a good day for us being 3,000 coming to our site vs a good day for tjoos.com being over 50,000. The best way for me to put this into a visual perspective is to think of the number of people I could see at the John Mayer concert and think over the past week we've had more visitors than a sold out John Mayer concert.