I spent some time curled up with a Mountain Dew and Google Analytics this morning, looking at the traffic on my Web sites and trying to figure out better ways to try to make money from them. My most popular site, xeromag.com, is mostly a hobby site; the ad revenue I make from it barely pays for bandwidth (and often doesn’t even do that). My BDSM site, symtoys.com, is the main place I sell my sex game Onyx and posters of the Map of Human Sexuality.

Google told me all kinds of interesting things about both sites, some of which were rather surprising and unexpected. For example:

– The main Web site, www.xeromag.com, sees about 60,000 unique visitors a month. Most of them (62%) come from Google search results.

– The most popular search terms that land folks on xeromag.com have to do with BDSM; the top search terms are “BDSM,” “kinky sex ideas,” “bondage ideas,” and “BDSM ideas.” Polyamory is fairly far down the list. However:

– Folks who use search terms related to polyamory spend a lot longer on the site (5 minutes 44 seconds per page average visit) than folks who use search terms related to BDSM (2 minutes 17 seconds per page average visit).

– The stickiest search term, at over 8 minutes average visit length, is “being a second in a polyamorous relationship.”

– The search terms that lead to the most page visits all have to do with Myers-Briggs compatibility, with about 300 visitors a month coming into the site on keyword searches related to MBTI, and a whopping average of 33 page reads(!) per visit. You read it here first, folks: Myers-Briggs personality typing is the gateway drug to BDSM and polyamory.

– The most popular pages on the Xeromag site, in order, are the BDSM scenarios page, the BDSM FAQ, the BDSM glossary, the polyamory FAQ, and the parody of the MBTI personality typing system. The grammar cheat sheet comes in sixth.

– The most popular search term that lands people on the grammar page? “Peaked my interest.”

The Symtoys site had more surprises. Chief among them:

– The most popular page on the site? I would never have guessed this: How to make an ice dildo.

– The site is sticky; the average visit length is about 4 minutes, and the average number of pages viewed per visit is 4. However, it also has a high bounce rate; factoring out folks who come in and then immediately leave, the average length of a visit is about nine and a half minutes(!).

– The most common search terms are “sex game,” “onyx game,” “breast bondage,” “how to breast bondage,” and “karada breast bondage.” About 1/3 of the top 250 search terms include breast bondage in some way. Apparently, there are a lot of folks who are really interested in tying up their partner’s breasts out there Maybe I should do some more tutorials on the subject.

– Some weird search terms get folks to the Symtoys site, such as “honey his cock is so big,” “DIY PVC,” and “creative uses for frogs” (that one has me baffled–if folks are using frogs in the bedroom, I don’t want to know about it!).

– StumbleUpon sends symtoys.com three times more traffic than Google does (WTF?).

After considering all this data, I have come to the conclusion that I really don’t understand half of what goes on on my Web sites.