The numbers below for 'Bloggers Stats' and 'Google Analytics' are pageviews, not visitor numbers. Stats are shown for 2015 first, then 2014 are shown further down for comparison. The numbers in brackets in the Month column are the numbers of posts published in that period.
Annual visits by month
| Month 2015 | Blogger Stats | Google Analytics | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January (2) | 65,480 | 13,016 | ||
| February (3) | 52,415 | 11,537 | ||
| March (3) | 48,442 | 11,574 | ||
| April (2) | 51,089 | 10,668 | ||
| May (6) | 38,921 | 9,873 | ||
| June (0) | 34,057 | 8,722 | ||
| July (5) | 40,194 | 9,122 | ||
| August (5) | 37,471 | 9,196 | ||
| September (1) | 35,701 | 9,748 | ||
| October (7) | 38,981 | 9,846 | ||
| November (13) | 29,538 | 8,262 | ||
| December (3) | 26,066 | 6,369 | ||
| Totals (50) | 498,355 | 117,933 | ||
| Monthly avg | 41,529 | 9,828 |
| Month 2014 | Blogger Stats | Google Analytics | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January (11) | 59,624 | 17,103 | ||
| February (2) | 58,153 | 17,792 | ||
| March (10) | 71,487 | 18,697 | ||
| April (7) | 65,703 | 18,040 | ||
| May (12) | 62,413 | 16,351 | ||
| June (7) | 65,194 | 15,781 | ||
| July (11) | 73,391 | 17,243 | ||
| August (8) | 68,295 | 16,540 | ||
| September (8) | 61,177 | 14,835 | ||
| October (12) | 69,856 | 12,950 | ||
| November (2) | 57,221 | 10,920 | ||
| December (10) | 67,118 | 11,455 | ||
| Totals (100) | 779,632 | 187,707 | ||
| Monthly avg | 64,969 | 15,642 |
Lifetime views
Here's a Blogger Statistics snapshot of all the stats, highlighting an example of December 2012 with 32,422 pageviews. This was followed by a bit of a spike then a period of fairly high numbers of visits before tailing off to where we are now.
According to the Blogger counter (which you can see in the right hand side column on this page if you're viewing this post on the desktop version, example screenshot below) this blog has now ticked over to 2.1 million views, which is a spectacularly huge amount for a fairly chaotic blog that isn't really about anything in particular. However the truth is much less exciting.
Most of the 2.1m lifetime views (and remember this is VIEWS not VISITORS) will have come from Google itself indexing my blog. Google redoes this every few days and quite possibly every few hours - I've noticed that a few minutes after publishing a post it's findable on Google, so possibly it indexes even more frequently, perhaps not surprising as Google owns Blogger. Total lifetime views for the blog are actually 570,000+ according to Google Analytics.
Popular posts
There are a very few exceptionally popular posts on this blog, relating to what happens when you block someone on Twitter or how unprivate private Twitter accounts really are (given how much you can infer from the tweets people send to the private account) but most of the posts are at the lower end of the 'long tail' getting a few tens or hundreds of visits. Admittedly many of my posts are really diary entries, or things just there to remind me.
Here are the Top 10 posts according to Google Analytics. You can see a big drop between each item on the list.
Posting rate
In 2015 I wrote 48 posts compared with 100 in 2014. I was quite a bit busier in 2015 and probably wrote more blog posts for the various work blogs that I run (there are two of them, plus about 12 other blogs I run for fun) rather than on here, so the output has halved. In 2013 it was 140 posts, 2012: 141 / 2011: 89 and 2010 had 77 posts, so this year is my year of not blogging very much, though I did manage to beat my first year of blogging which was 45 in 2009. In tabulated form...
| Year | Number of posts | |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 45 | |
| 2010 | 77 | |
| 2011 | 89 | |
| 2012 | 141 | |
| 2013 | 140 | |
| 2014 | 100 | |
| 2015 | 48 |
It's difficult to know. As you can see there's been quite a drop in numbers of visits this year. Possibly this is to do with changes in the way Google search rates my blog (and whether or not it shows it to people), possibly it's because I've written far fewer posts, or on topics that aren't particularly interesting to readers or Google's algorithms. I know that some people have found their visits and visitor numbers dropped after some new search ranking 'thing' that changed (something to do with Pandas, didn't pay much attention to it) - possibly I was hit by that but it may just be that I've said everything that others wanted to hear and am now just talking to myself ;)
Interestingly, one thing I have on this blog is a very, very high bounce rate (over 90%). This can either be disastrous (as far as Google is concerned) because it implies that someone arrives at a page on my blog and shortly after leaves. As far as Google is concerned this probably means that the information on my blog is irrelevant or of low value and so Google lowers the rank it assigns to my blog. The alternative (and naturally preferred by me) is the more flattering delusion that people arrive, find the answer promptly to whatever they were searching for and then leave. Google doesn't approve of high bounce rates unfortunately.
Were I to try and create a marginally more 'successful' blog I would do the following
- pick a topic, not a random collection of things that happen to interest me this week
- post regularly - that doesn't necessarily mean frequently, just with some degree of periodicity
- connect my blog to Google+ and send a tweet about every published post, also to Facebook
- use WordPress.com which has a much better infrastructure (and useful tags and categories) to get my posts seen by more eyes
- find a way to keep people ON my blog for longer (eg links to other posts in a more systematic way, more pictures etc).
Previous "blog stats" posts
- Blog stats for this blog (23 January 2011) for 2010 - blog getting around 3,000-4,000 hits per month - as assessed by Blogger (Google Analytics is always much lower)
- Blog stats for this blog part two (30 December 2011) for 2011 - around 4,000-8,000 hits per month (Blogger stats)
- Blog stats for this blog part three (13 October 2012) for 2012 - 8,000-25,000 hits, 32,000 by December (Blogger stats)
- Blog stats for this blog part four (26 October 2013) for 2013 - around 40,000 hits per month (Blogger stats) - added 2 Jan 2014
- Blog stats for this blog part 5 (31 December 2014) for 2014 - around 65,000 hits per month (Blogger) or 15,000 according to Google Analytics
- Blog stats for this blog part 6 (25 December 2015) for 2015 - around xx,xxx hits per month (Blogger) or xx,xxx according to Google Analytics
Edit 10 Nov 2020 - I've removed a bit of text from my front page below the counter. It gave context to the number shown, but only up to 2015, it said "- but Google Analytics says 524k visitors, 570k pageviews from 1Jun10-31Dec15"
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Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.
Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).