Contest Winners

It's time! The moment 6 of you have been waiting for!!! Now, both of these winners were drawn from a hat, there was no outside influence, such as who's Christmas order was larger, or who got the biggest Wedding Album. :) haha.

PART ONE
We ran a two part contest this year, where one part was more difficult and actually required some action. Contestants were instructed to basically make someone's day this Christmas. I invited them to make cookies, or buy a gift, or do something nice for someone you don't know very well. We baked cookies and gave them to Jodi's doctor, and our UPS man.... very fun! Out of the 3 wonderful stories we received this Christmas, the randomly selected winner is....

Marcie + Chris!

Thanks for playing guys, and for thinking outside the box to make someone's Christmas even better!  You've won a Keurig Single-cup Coffee Maker compliments of GP!  

PART TWO

Part two of the contest was to simply send in a photo of your Christmas tree.  Everyone decorates their tree quite differently, and it's fun to see the different styles.  The only requirement was that there is a coffee mug included in the picture, so that I knew it was a recent photo.  The randomly selected winner is....

Nicole Chmelar!

Nicole wins a $15 Gift Card to Starbucks!  

•••

Thanks to all of you who sent in entries to both contests.... you will have more opportunities to win in 2009!  We are grateful to all of you who read the blog, and leave comments for us.  It's a blessing to be able to encourage and inspire you with our stories and our work, and it's quite humbling at times to realize that so many of you keep coming back to this blog to see what's going on at GP.  

•••

It was exactly one year ago, that Google Analytics and I began our courtship.  My role in the relationship was to paste a bit of code into our blog, and Google's responsibility was to use that code to keep track of who visited the blog, where they were from, their name, weight/height, social security numbers, credit card information and a whole bunch of useful information. Just kidding, it doesn't keep track of all that stuff.  If you're new to this blog, my name is Rodney and I am hilarious.:)

Now, I know some of these numbers aren't huge compared to some of our fellow photogs, but because I think it's interesting, here's some GP Blog end of the year stats:

• There were 39,000 visits to the GP blog from 71 countries with USA, Canada, Thailand, UK, and Germany having the top 5 most visits.

• 49 of the 50 United States visited the blog (c'mon Vermont!  Get your act together!) with Iowa, Pennsylvania, Illinios, Ohio, and Minnesota visiting the most.

• The average time visitors spent on the blog:  1 min, 30 seconds.

• 86% of visitors are using Windows PCs, and 12% are using Macintosh.

• 78% of readers re-visited the blog at least once.

• 14% came back 100 times or more last year.

• Monday was the day most people visited the blog. 

• October was month with the highest traffic.

• 4:00pm was the time of day the most people visited. 

Interesting, isn't it. :)