Blog stats for this blog - part four

Previously, on blog stats for this blog:
Blog stats for this blog (23 January 2011)
Blog stats for this blog - part two (30 December 2011)
Blog stats for this blog - part three (13 October 2012)
Blog stats for this blog - part four - this post!

Roughly every year I post the blog stats (from Blogger's own analytics and Google Analytics) for my blog in case anyone else fancies having a bit of a nosey at this sort of thing.

Blogger stats are not accurate but are instead much more inflated and flattering (I think it counts every time Google indexes the blog - I know from checking that any new post I write is indexed by Google within about three minutes, not that surpising given that Google owns Blogger). Google Analytics stats are more accurate.

My first post on this blog was in June 2009 and according to Blogger's own information about hits for that post it's had 54 views. A post written a month later had over 4,500 and one posted a week after that had 18,000 hits (that's in total, to the present day). A post written in August had 103 hits which I hope demonstrates that post hits are extremely variable!

Blogger stats information became available after my blog began but confusingly the first picture below implies that people were viewing my site in May 2007 (though I didn't have this blog then!) so it's a bit mistaken. The second picture shows that the first visits were in May 2008, and I didn't have the blog then either, though the pictures are otherwise identical (the upper one has a few extra months' worth of data though).

Blogger Analytics says I've had a total of 738,630 visits (presumably since Day One). I generally assume that it's 3x too large.

I added Google Analytics information to my blog in May 2010.
From May 2010 to October 2013 it says I've had 201,587 unique visitors making 222,387 site visits leading to 273,175 page views.

I've no idea where my blog falls in terms of average hits so I'm not really in a position to feel either smug or embarrassed by the numbers, so here goes...

Blogger
January 2013 - 42,893
February 2013 - 40,045
March 2013 - 44,784
April 2013 - 44,532
May 2013 - 42.641
June 2013 - 51.127
July 2013 - 64,599
August 2013 - 54,315
September 2013 - 45,748
October 2013 (unfinished, posted on 26 October) - 31,000+

Google Analytics (90% visitors are new)

January 2013 - 11k visitors, 13k pageviews
February 2013 - 10k visitors, 12k pageviews
March 2013 - 11.7k, 13.9k
April 2013 - 10.7k, 12.1k
May 2013 - 11.2k, 12.4k
June 2013 - 13.7k, 15.4k
July 2013 - 18.1k, 20.4k
August 2013 - 13.1k, 14.8k
September 2013 - 10.1k, 11.6k
1-25 October 2013 - 8.9k, 10.1k

Bounce rate
I have a very high bounce rate - over 90%. This can mean two things and it's difficult to tell which is the case. The bad one would be that people click on a post, realise it's irrelevant and click away (most business SEO sites would consider a 90% bounce rate to be disastrous as the visitor has not clicked on another page to buy something, but I'm not selling anything). The good one would be that they click on a post, have their question answered and, hopefully satisfied, leave. Given that my most popular posts are along the lines of 'how to do something' (often on Twitter) I'm hoping it's that one.

Not that long ago I had a list of all my tags appearing on the blog, I'm not sure what possessed me but it must have seemed like a good idea - perhaps to let people see what sort of posts were available. I think all that does is bring up irrelevant posts to people who are searching for something (just because a word appears on a page doesn't mean the post it appears on is about that). So I've removed them.

Most popular posts 
(according to Blogger, I can't be bothered to wrangle the stats in Google Analytics but assume that they're all much lower across the board by the same amount - see stats above to see discrepancies between Blogger Stats and Google Analytics)

What happens if you block someone on Twitter? What... 7 Jun 2012, 59 comments	246735
Phen375 weight loss pills "reviewed" 14 Jan 2012, 33 comments	25344
Where London science communicators might work 24 Jul 2009, 9 comments	15280
There's not much to be said in favour of releasing... 3 Jun 2012, 2 comments	14700
How to get rid of lines in Word (Microsoft Word 20... 16 May 2012, 21 comments	14561
How to find old tweets 5 Jun 2010, 3 comments	14100
Easy ways to see the tweets of someone who's block... 8 Oct 2012	14077
Twitter has killed off RSS feeds, that's why your ... 12 Jun 2013, 25 comments	12237
A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets 30 May 2011, 9 comments	10846
Abandoned Britain - half day nerd trips 24 Oct 2010, 7 comments	9420

Interesting that the most popular post is 10x more popular than the second most popular post (that one gets the most spam comments, several a week). My least popular post had 17 views ;)

Tweeting links to posts
I publish a link on Twitter to only about half of the posts I write. In terms of blog 'audience building' I'm a bit of a "failure" as I write about many different topics. For me this is more interesting of course but it does mean that my blog isn't really about anything in particular so there's nothing for an audience to really get to grips with. I follow and am followed by scientists, science communicators, charity folk, film music fans, people who like tinkering with electronics, sound designers and consequently any given post is unlikely to be of interest to most of them - except the ones about Twitter.

However most (over 80%) of my views are referred through search engines so that's why I don't really bother with tweeting everything. Professional bloggers will post a tweet with a link to their blog several times throughout the day to drive traffic, and perhaps ask their networks to retweet them. This is an important part of the ecosystem but since this blog is mostly my diary I'm a bit 'meh' about doing that unless there's a post I definitely want to get feedback on. Presumably they also get a fair bit of search engine referrals too.