By Emmanuel Narokobi - 7th June 2006

The www.surfingpapuanewguinea.org.pg website was one of the earliest jobs we did and in order to show some tracking of visits to the site we used a free tracker on the homepage. Looking at it today the number of visits is 3,893. Although it may seem allot, the tracker is very basic and is unable to give us more detailed information about the visitors to the site. For arguments sake we can say that since the website was done in 2003, that would mean that at 365 days a year and over 4 years ago the site is roughly been live for 1,460 days. Divide the 3,893 figure on the tracker by 1,460 days and the result is an average of 2.6 hits a day.

Since setting up Google Analytics (GA), we decided to implement GA on the www.surfingpapuanewguinea.org.pg website. We were pleasantly surprised to see how popular (in PNG terms) the website actually was. I guess it is not surprising considering its international tourism appeal and the fact that PNG is perhaps one of the last frontiers in surfing.

After setting up GA for the surfing website on the 20th May 2006, the site has to date received 209 visitors in its 19 days of GA operation. From those 209 visitors, 180 were new visitors and 29 were returning visitors. So roughly around 10 people a day would have been visiting our surfing website over the last 19 days alone. Comparing that to the above result from the homepage tracker, you can see a very different picture now of the surfing website. So for example at 10 visits by 1,460 days we should have been seeing 14,600 visitors and not 3,893.

The vast difference is perhaps attributed to the fact that the free tracker service was perhaps only tracking new visitors but not returning visitors which could explain the lower number. On the other hand we can safely assume that GA is accurate because each of the 209 visitors can be traced back to the Internet Service Provider they originated from, hence giving each visitor a recorded place of origin and thus verifying each visitor.

To further expand on the information GA can collect, we also have statistics for how many pages these 209 people looked at. These are called page views. The figure for page views for the surf website was 1,132. This means that the 209 visitors looked at the various pages of the website 1,132 times over the last 19 days. We were clearly impressed because for the first time we had some real detail in the statistics to show different ways of analysing visitor information.

What was equally more impressive was our ability to see where in the world all these visits and page views were coming from. So in regards to the geographic location of our visitors we found that 104 visits came from Australia. This represented 48.6% of our website visits coming from just one country, which was our highest ranking country. So what does this mean to the Surfing Association of PNG? well it means that perhaps they need to increase their surf marketing to the Australian market because they seem to be quite keen on seeing what is on our surfing website. To break this down even further GA was able to tell us that from the 104 visits coming from Australia, 35 visits came from New South Wales and 31 visits came from Queensland. So even more targeted marketing can now be planned.

Another interesting feature of GA was it’s indication of the sources for its visits to the surfing website. In other words whether people visiting the website had directly typed in the website name in a browser or if they had got to the surf site from a link from another website. It turns out that the largest source of visits was 75 out of 209 visits, this came from Google searches. The second largest source were direct visits at 48 out of 209 visits. The most encouraging and exciting one was the third source at 31 visits from the Tourism Promotion Authority (TPA) website. This is clearly good news as it shows that the TPA website is actually doing it’s job of promoting tourism activities in PNG.

We had a meeting today with TPA and they too will be included in our limited list of GA clients. Our guess is that if the surfing website is getting these types of visits then the visits to the TPA site must be by far greater. The Surfing Association of PNG and TPA can now begin taking major leaps forward in better understanding their markets to improve the tourism industry in PNG.