Joop Dorresteijn, who is co-founder and CTO at unitedstyles, noticed some interesting statistics in our Google Analytics about traffic from Belgium and wrote about it on his personal blog. I repost the full article here with his permission:
Belgium is about to reach an accord to form a government after a 536 day impasse, as we could read on bloomberg today. “A cut in Belgium’s credit rating by Standard & Poor’s last week triggered the final push to end the stalemate between Dutch and French speakers that had threatened to tear the country apart.”
Whilst I follow this news and have seen some of Belgium a few times, it never so clearly showed to me how divided the country is until unitedstyles was featured in an article (click here to read) on de standaard, a Flemish tabloid sized newspaper.
At unitedstyles, and most other webshops, we use software to track where our visitors come from, in our case Google Analytics. You can see your visitors per country, but also per city. When I was just browsing around and took a peek at our Belgium traffic, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing:
I figured when the article came out, visitors would mostly come from the Flemish side, which is Dutch speaking. But besides one single dot for the French speaking part, all our visits came from the Flemish north!
Of course I hope the country will stabilize and ’L’union fait la force’ will return, just thought this was a interesting stat for others to see.