Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

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Showing posts with label analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label analytics. Show all posts

Wednesday, 27 December 2017

Blog stats for this blog part 8 (27 December 2017)

Every year I post the blog stats for this blog, and this is my eighth year of doing so (previous years at the end). I do it in case other people might be nosey :)

There seems to be a correlation between the number of posts I write on this blog and its visitors / pageviews, apart from an odd blip in December 2016. I don't have a posting schedule, as the title of this blog suggests I literally only post 'Stuff that occurs to me', as and when it occurs. As I blog a lot elsewhere too this site has diminished somewhat.

Index
  • Table 1: Blog posts per year, by year (= how many blog posts have I written each year?)
  • Fig 1: Blogger's 'all time view' for this site
  • Table 2: Blog stats, by month, for 2017 (= how many people visited this blog, per month, this year?)
  • Table 3: Annual and lifetime views of this blog (= how many people visited this blog each year and the overall total?)
  • Fig 2: Google Analytics 'all time view' for this site
  • Fig 3: The most popular posts on this blog, all time, Blogger stats
  • Particular features of this blog
  • All previous annual stats overview posts, by year

Table 1: Blog posts per year, by year

2009 (45)
2010 (77)
2011 (89)
2012 (141)
2013 (141)
2014 (100)
2015 (50)
2016 (40)
2017 (45 including this one)

Fig 1: Blogger stats 'all time view'.


The most interesting thing about the stats for me is always the vast difference between Blogger's pageviews (1st column in Table 1) and Google Analytics' (3rd column in Table 1). This is generally understood to be because Blogger counts every 'hit' including Google's indexing crawlers and not just real people. I've also included the number of people visiting each month (2nd column), to my knowledge Blogger doesn't provide that info. Odd because Blogger 'is' Google. See explanation below for what numbers in brackets or coloured red mean.

Table 2: Blog stats, by month, for 2017
Month              Pageviews (Blogger)      Visitors (Google)         Page views (Google)
January (7) 36,563 6,583 7,508
February (1) 28,887 5,046 5,679
March (3) 27,220 5,055 5,593
April (4) 18,509 3,767 4,275
May (3) 18,409 3,775 4,314
June (0) 13,398 3,523 3,995
July (7) 12,298 2,905 3,430
August (2) 13,271 2,511 2,891
September (1) 10,992 2,336 2,657
October (3) 11,653 2,660 3,019
November (9) 11,409 2,327 2,818
December (5..)   8,679.. 1,602.. 1,831..
Total               202,609..                          42,090..                         46,179..

Table 2 info
Figures in brackets next to the month are the number of blog posts published that month. 

Figures in red are uncorrected because the month hasn't finished yet, this obviously affects the annual total too.

I briefly switched off this blog in Dec 2016 as I seemed to be getting a suspiciously high number of visits from Russia (I assumed bots) and January is still showing unusually high numbers. You can see the December blip in the all-time view from Blogger above (Fig 1).

 Table 3: Annual and lifetime views of this blog

Year              Pageviews (Blogger)      Visitors (Google) Page views(Google)
2010 (77) 23,351     9,630*   18,958*
2011 (89) 65,972   22,343   40,263
2012 (141) 187,506   57,040   77,869
2013 (141) 553,064 136,941 164,352
2014 (100) 779,632 199,217 226,419
2015 (50) 498,355 113,129 130,115
2016 (40) 379,613   66,614   77,092
2017 (45) 202,609   42,090   46,179
Lifetime      2,690,102                            657,004                 781,247
                                                                646,005^^              784,105


Table 3 info
Figures in brackets next to the year are the number of blog posts published that year. December is in red because I'm writing this on 27th not 31st so figures are incomplete by 5 days which marginally affects the final totals too.
*I began counting stats on Google Analytics in April 2010. Blogger began its own stats system in July 2010.
^) Count of everything in the column above it (Google Analytics)
^^) lifetime count as given on Google Analytics for whole year (there's a slight disparity)

Fig 2: Google Analytics 'all time view'.


 Popular posts for this blog (for all time)
Fig 3: The most popular posts on this blog, all time, Blogger stats



Features of my blog to take into account
Or, mitigating circumstances / excuses ;)
  • People find my posts almost entirely through search engine results (I don't promote my blog heavily on social media, though I do mention it fairly regularly)
  • The most popular posts here are about how to do something, often on Twitter - the answer to people's question(s) can usually be found within the first paragraph or the title, with the rest of the post containing supplemental information. This means that I have a VERY high bounce rate - people arrive, see the answer, leave. If this were a sales website that would be disastrous but as a largely 'how to' info blog that's OK. 
  • My blog is about many different things and therefore unfocused.
  • I don't have a regular posting schedule and literally post stuff as it occurs to me, which is appropriate given the name of the blog.
  • I now have a dedicated 'howto' blog where I post most of my instructional posts. That's on WordPress and as of 27 Dec 2017 has had 24,384 visitors (27,449 visits). I have several other blogs too (one for stuff near Blackheath, one to collect recipes that weren't too disastrous) not to mention two work blogs - so I am rather spreading myself thinly and this is reflected in fewer posts here and consquently fewer visits/-ors.

Previous posts about this blog's stats







Posted by Jo at 15:05 0 comments
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Tuesday, 27 December 2016

Blog stats for this blog part 7 (27 December 2016)

Every year I post the blog stats for this blog, and this is my seventh year of doing so. I do it in case other people might be nosey :)

The most interesting thing about the stats for me is always the vast difference between Blogger's pageviews (1st column in Table 1) and Google Analytics' (3rd column in Table 1). This is generally understood to be because Blogger counts every 'hit' including Google's indexing crawlers and not just real people. I've also included the number of people visiting each month (2nd column), to my knowledge Blogger doesn't provide that info. Odd because Blogger 'is' Google. See explanation below for what numbers in brackets or coloured red mean.

Table 1: Blog stats, by month, for 2016
Month              Pageviews (Blogger)      Visitors (Google)         Page views (Google)
January (7) 35,092 7,421 8,466
February (1) 27,505 6,671 7,668
March (4) 31,880 6,704 7,602
April (3) 25,857 6,041 6,877
May (2) 37,151 5,173 5,923
June (5) 29,389 5,669 6,550
July (2) 35,874 4,842 5,578
August (4) 30,244 4,957 5,877
September (0) 25,266 4,197 4,776
October (6) 27,249 5,611 6,391
November (3) 26,971 5,491 6,512
December (2) 53,578 5,145 5,898
Total                 386,056                           67,494                           78,118

Table 1 info
Figures in brackets next to the month are the number of blog posts published that month. 

Figures in red are uncorrected because the month hasn't finished yet. December has had a massive increase in Blogger views - I took my blog offline yesterday for a few hours and it seems to have settled back again. Looked like lots of 'views' from Russia but no-one actually viewing any posts (at least the numbers don't match). Nothing against real visitors from Russia but a sudden spike from 1,000 to 4,000 in one day seems a bit suspicious.

Not only is there a disparity between Blogger and Google page views for every month there's also an inconsistency in the mapping (eg 1,000 Google page views doesn't equal 2,000 Blogger ones - there's no obvious mathematical relationship between them).

 Table 2: Lifetime and annual views of this blog
Year              Pageviews (Blogger)      Visitors (Google) Page views(Google)
2010 (77) 23,351     9,630*   18,958*
2011 (89) 65,972   22,343   40,263
2012 (141) 187,506   57,040   77,869
2013 (141) 553,064 136,941 164,352
2014 (100) 779,632 199,217 226,419
2015 (50) 498,355 113,129 130,115
2016 (39) 379,613   66,614   77,092
Lifetime      2,487,538                            491,785^                735,068
                                                               603,408^^               735,068


Table 2 info
Figures in brackets next to the year are the number of blog posts published that year.
*I began counting stats on Google Analytics in April 2010. Blogger began its own stats system in July 2010.
^) Count of everything in the column above it 
^^) lifetime count as given on Google Analytics - no idea why there's a difference, especially as the 735,068 is the same for both.

Popular posts for this blog (for all time)


Features of my blog to take into account
  • People find my posts almost entirely through search engine results (I don't promote my blog heavily on social media, though I do mention it fairly regularly)
  • The most popular posts here are about how to do something, often on Twitter - the answer to people's question(s) can usually be found within the first paragraph or the title, with the rest of the post containing supplemental information. This means that I have a VERY high bounce rate - people arrive, see the answer, leave. If this were a sales website that would be disastrous but as a largely 'how to' info blog that's OK. 
  • My blog is about many different things and therefore unfocused.
  • I don't have a regular posting schedule and literally post stuff as it occurs to me, which is appropriate given the name of the blog.

Previous posts about this blog's stats




Posted by Jo at 01:11 0 comments
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Saturday, 26 December 2015

Blog stats for this blog part 6 (26 December 2015)

Welcome to an annual tradition! For the last few years I've been publishing my blog stats (both those counted by Blogger, which includes all Google indexing visits and gives a much higher number than is true, and Google Analytics which is much closer to reality) in case anyone else is interested in this.

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





What do the blog stats mean?
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). 
... but since this blog is just for my own entertainment I've not really done any of that.

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"



Posted by Jo at 10:07 0 comments
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Sunday, 23 March 2014

Twitter Analytics - quite fun

Edit: 29 March 2014 - I'm not sure if the number of clicks reflects people clicking on it from my tweet or just the total (across all of Twitter) number of clicks regardless of who's shared the link. I had a look at my analytics yesterday and saw that a link I'd tweeted a few days ago was now up at 200+ clicks but that increase can't have come from my tweet which is now buried further down my timeline.


Yesterday I discovered that Twitter Analytics exist and are free, and a bit fascinating.

To play along, be logged into Twitter then go to https://analytics.twitter.com/ - you can see how often people have clicked on links and there's a record of the number of favourites, retweets and replies.

When I had a look through I spotted that a link I'd posted a few days ago to a concert in July I'm bonkersly excited about (David Arnold: live in concert = film music!) had been clicked 30 times. I've sinced tweeted it again and it's now gone up to 72 thanks to more retweets.

I've actually tweeted the link a few times since Feburary and would have expected each tweet to have a different number by it, depending on how many clicks it gets for a particular tweet, eg 15 click for the first tweet, another 10 for the second, 20 for the third and so on - but each of them now displays '72 clicks' - so the number of clicks for any given tweet isn't available, as you can see below.

Click to embiggen any of the pictures to see them a bit more clearly


The pic above doesn't mean that the link was clicked 72 times for both tweets (144 clicks) but 72 overall.



It's entirely possible that no-one clicked the link from this tweet as I wasn't actually 'sharing a link' as such, more asking possibly-nerdier followers to see if they knew what the glitch was (since fixed).


I'd have thought the more honest, and truthful, thing would be for the number of clicks to reflect how many came from a particular tweet as it would seem that that would be more useful (eg telling you that more people click through at 10am on Monday morning than they do at 10am on Thursday morning or whatever).

Still, it's quite fun.

Apparently Twitter is also telling some users (using the iOS Twitter app) how many people have viewed their tweet too (hat tip @simonhowes).






Posted by Jo at 09:50 0 comments
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