Most popular baby name origin?

I have a website that has a list of 7,000 baby names sorted by name, origin, & gender.

The site is:
http://SearchBabyNamesOnline.com

When I first started the site I had no idea people what kinds of baby names people were looking for so I listed the 90 Origins (Afghani to Latin to Yiddish) in alphabetical order and just assumed people would scan the list and find what the were looking for.

I also assumed the baby name origins were searched for in roughly the same proportions (e.g. the number people looking for Irish names is about the same number of people looking for Afghani names and any other name origin).

Well, I looked at my Google Analytics and boy was I was wrong!

It turned out that 10 origins (out of the 90 total) got 80% of the visits! (Interestingly enough Zipf’s Law actually describes this kind of disproportional relationship.)

Most surprising was that among the top was Hindi baby names, something I never would have guessed.

So I switched things around and put the 10 most visited origins on the top of the list of origins, with the other not so popular 80 origins below.

The result: I noticed a small increase in the number of pages each visitor looks at before leaving.

It would appear that by making popular things more accessible and easier to find people stayed longer at the site. This was confirmed when I saw an increase in my AdSense earnings.

The moral of the story is that there is no substitute for testing and looking at what your website visitors are actually doing on your site. Tools like Google Analytics are invaluable for figuring out how visitors interact (or fail to interact) with your site.

Good night and good luck,
Nick

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