I have written about addiction before in this blog, and now I have to admit that I, too, am becoming an addict - to my own blog statistics. These last few weeks, I have checked them almost every single day (sometimes more than once), and I often spend several minutes trying to figure out what it is I am looking at. A while back this was very difficult, because there seemed to be something wrong with the hit counter (I kept getting lots and lots of 8 hit-peaks, at irregular intervals. First I thought these were crawler visits, then I realised that is was far more likely that each group of eight was actually a single hit, but it still made it very difficult to distinguish any patterns), but now, hopefully, the hit counter is working as it should again.
Basically, I get three types of hits.
1) Friends, family and colleagues who will drop by every once in a while to read what I am writing (I know this because they sometimes comment on my entries in person);
2) Companies that scour the internet for clients and visit blog sites in the hope that the author will return the favour (I have actually done this myself, out of curiosity) and buy their wares;
3) Readers that do not know me or vice versa.
- any of which can be one-offs, repeating visitors, or regular readers.
Personally, I am most interested in the last category of readers. That is also why my entries are usually quite general; they are written so that as to make some kind to any reader, not just people who know me. And of this huge pool of possible readers, I am of course most interested to know what is it that captures people's initial attention, and what makes them come back.
To answer the first question, I look at the traffic sources. Most of my hits come from Google searches for specific combinations of words. Some (like "effort + result") are aimed at finding specific content, others are aimed at finding my blog ("surviving + western + civilisation") or at finding specific entries in my blog. Other sources seem to indicate that people have bookmarked a specific entry, and use that as the entry point to my blog. That makes it more difficult to distinguish between entries that are popular for their content, and entries that are only popular because they are certain regular visitors way of accessing the blog, but it is still nice to know that someone found my blog interesting enough to create a favourite or bookmark for it.
Interesting as all of this is (to me, anyway), there is one important thing I would very much like to know, but don't, and that is know how many hits actually resulted in somebody reading the content. The only way to know this is if I get a reaction, but unfortunately, the comments feature does not seem to work properly.
(And just in case you didn't pick up the hint: please try placing a comment or a "like", just to see if the features work).
Basically, I get three types of hits.
1) Friends, family and colleagues who will drop by every once in a while to read what I am writing (I know this because they sometimes comment on my entries in person);
2) Companies that scour the internet for clients and visit blog sites in the hope that the author will return the favour (I have actually done this myself, out of curiosity) and buy their wares;
3) Readers that do not know me or vice versa.
- any of which can be one-offs, repeating visitors, or regular readers.
Personally, I am most interested in the last category of readers. That is also why my entries are usually quite general; they are written so that as to make some kind to any reader, not just people who know me. And of this huge pool of possible readers, I am of course most interested to know what is it that captures people's initial attention, and what makes them come back.
To answer the first question, I look at the traffic sources. Most of my hits come from Google searches for specific combinations of words. Some (like "effort + result") are aimed at finding specific content, others are aimed at finding my blog ("surviving + western + civilisation") or at finding specific entries in my blog. Other sources seem to indicate that people have bookmarked a specific entry, and use that as the entry point to my blog. That makes it more difficult to distinguish between entries that are popular for their content, and entries that are only popular because they are certain regular visitors way of accessing the blog, but it is still nice to know that someone found my blog interesting enough to create a favourite or bookmark for it.
Interesting as all of this is (to me, anyway), there is one important thing I would very much like to know, but don't, and that is know how many hits actually resulted in somebody reading the content. The only way to know this is if I get a reaction, but unfortunately, the comments feature does not seem to work properly.
(And just in case you didn't pick up the hint: please try placing a comment or a "like", just to see if the features work).
According to a colleague of mine, "Statistics are like bikinis: they hide the most important things!"
ReplyDeleteDear Pieter,
ReplyDeleteprobably your collegue was referring to the Aaron Levenstein quote:
"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital!"
Kind regards,
WimD