Who in the world uses FIX ?

July 2010. I decided to get a snapshot of 3 months (90 days) of data from Google Analytics. I filtered out the occasional visitors and took into account only those who had executed at least one FIX message in either FIX Analyzer or FIX Log Analyzer.

In that period, the 'analyze' buttons on FIX Analyzer and FIX Log Analyzer had been pressed 23,129 times from 6,815 unique visitors in 75 countries.

Yes, I thought I have enough data to give a satisfactory answer about where FIX is getting used today.

Of course, I am assuming that apps which are using FIX to receive/send/execute messages are constantly debugged, diagnosed, studied and that many people turn to the web (specifically our ValidFIX site) to do more of this work...

Anyway, here is the chart and table I produced.

Country	Visitors
United States	2146	31.49%
United Kingdom	1207	17.71%
Brasil	542	7.95%
Sweden	232	3.40%
India	211	3.10%
Russia	202	2.96%
Hong Kong	199	2.92%
Germany	175	2.57%
Switzerland	154	2.26%
Japan	154	2.26%
Singapore	133	1.95%
Australia	123	1.80%
Italy	114	1.67%
Israel	110	1.61%
France	106	1.56%
Canada	104	1.53%
Ukraine	81	1.19%
Philippines	78	1.14%
Argentina	77	1.13%
Others*	667	9.79%

With Others* including the following 54 countries: 

• Andorra
• Austria
• Belarus
• Bolivia
• Bulgaria
• Chile
• China
• Colombia
• Croatia
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Ecuador
• Egypt
• Finland
• Georgia
• Greece
• Hungary
• Iceland
• Indonesia
• Ireland
• Isle of Man
• Jersey
• Jordan
• Kenya
• Kuwait
• Lebanon
• Macedonia [FYROM]
• Malaysia
• Malta
• Mexico
• Morocco
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Niger
• Norway
• Pakistan
• Poland
• Portugal
• Romania
• Saudi Arabia
• Serbia
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sri Lanka
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Tunisia
• Turkey
• United Arab Emirates
• Uruguay
• Vietnam

Hope this helps.
Thanks
Oonagh

Why ValidFIX likes Google (a tale of a pleasant, unexpected discovery.)

There was an interesting post on the official google web master blog in april: Using site speed in web search ranking

In short: speed matters, faster websites get a better ranking in google.

I read the post with interest and then moved on.

***

In developing our site we did not spend much effort in SEO – we just followed google standard rules – but we did obsess with performance.

People who work with FIX Messages deserve better tools to analyze their FIX messages and since we were going to deliver them through the web we did not want to sacrifice any aspect related to their usability.

To an extent, our obsession dictated our minimal GUI interface and made us work hard to follow strictly yahoo performance rules.

And then the pleasant discovery.

A week or two after google’s post we started seeing our ranking moving up. If a person was googling for ‘fix analyzer ‘ or ‘fix log analyzer’ we were coming as first or second result.

Beating onixs and firstfuturessoftware.

This was great news for us as more people were (and are) likely to find us but it made me wonder what was happening since I could not see new links from reputable websites (such as quickfixengine) linking to us.

Was the google engine just taking its time to update the ranking ?

Maybe, but I believe it’s more likely that we have been rewarded for designing and delivering a fast website.

Thanks for reading this.