I set up Google Analytics on my site yesterday for all the typical reasons. I want to see traffic quantities, patterns, and statistics as well as play around with the software. It can take up to 24 hours before it starts reporting data (it starts gathering data as soon as you add their script on your pages though). So I check it this morning, and, not surprisingly, there isn’t a whole lot of activity.

But as I played around with some of the reports, an interesting datum caught my eye. I had two visits that came from Google search results. “Who the hell is searching for me on Google?” I think out loud. So I take a look at the keywords. It turns out these visitors weren’t interested in me at all (surprise, surprise), but instead were searching for Los Angeles traffic on Google. What?!

Sometime during or soon after college, I played around with adding traffic data to a Google map of L.A. I was just testing out the Google Maps API and figured traffic data made sense to work with (at the time, Google apparently hadn’t heard of traffic since they didn’t add the feature until late 2007). I used a PHP script to pull data from Yahoo and overlaid (I hate the term “mash-up”) that data onto a Google map and put it up here. Then I promptly did nothing else with it. So you’ll understand my surprise when I saw that page randomly getting hits from Google queries.

What is even more impressive is that I’m the number three result for google traffic los angeles and the number one result for la traffic google! I haven’t played around with other queries much, but having my site come up as a top result for those two is very cool and rather amusing. Unfortunately, the same doesn’t occur on Yahoo or Bing (another surprise).

But now that I’ve discovered this, I feel I should go back and put some more effort into the page and make it a more useful resource. Maybe I can get repeat visitors! Then I could start pulling down ten cents per month by slapping on some Google ads! The possibilities are endless. But mostly, it would be fun to turn that page into something even a small number of people get use out of on a regular basis.

Feel free to check it out and let me know what useful stuff pertaining to L.A. traffic you’d like to see on there (not that there is much content there now); any and all input is appreciated.