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

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Showing posts with label blogger stats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogger stats. Show all posts

Wednesday, 25 December 2019

Blog stats for this blog part 10 (25 December 2019)

tl;dr version
I've been blogging at Google's Blogger for over 10 years now and Blogger records over 2.9m visits for this Stuff that occurs to me blog, but Google Analytics tends to be vastly more conservative and suggests it's nearer ~700,000 visitors and ~800,000 visits (ie each person visiting slightly more than one page). In 2019 I've had about 13,000 visitors here, quite a big drop from when I was posting about three or four times as many posts on this blog. I'm blogging more elsewhere (How to Do Various Techy Things had 149,000 visitors this year for example).


Every year I post the blog stats for this blog, and this is my tenth 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 2019 (= 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)
2018 (30)
2019 (33)

Fig 1: Blogger's 'all time view' for this site 
 Fig 1: Blogger stats 'all time view'. All time views as of today is 2,971,921

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). 

The most interesting thing about the stats for me is always the vast difference between Blogger's pageviews (1st column in Table 2) and Google Analytics' (3rd column in Table 2). 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  mean.

Table 2: Blog stats, by month, for 2019
Month              Pageviews (Blogger)      Visitors (Google)         Page views (Google)
January (7) 10,665 1,312 1,508
February (0)   9,494 1,121 1,306
March (2)   9,455 1,041 1,207
April (4) 10,058   928 1,005
May (3) 10,720 1,105 1,247
June (0)   9,401 1,113 1,252
July (3)   9,851 1,246`̉ 1,395
August (1) 11,108 1,237 1,436
September (2)   9,115 1,086 1,283
October (4) 11,891 1,212 1,490
November (4) 13,338 1,053 1,254
December (3)   8,235..    963 1,339
Total (33)        115,096..                          13,316                           15,722

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


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
2018 (29) 141,815   20,725   24,044
2019 (33) 123,331   13,316   15,722
Lifetime      2,955,248                            681,045                 821,013
                    2,971,857*                          680,073^               824,140^^

Table 3 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.
*, ^ and ^^ are counts of everything in the columns above done in different ways hence a slight disparity.

Fig 2: Google Analytics 'all time view'.

 Fig 2: Google Analytics' 'all time view'.


 Fig 3. Most visited posts for this blog (for all time) 
Fig 3: The most popular posts on this blog
 
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 summary, or tl;dr, paragraph or the title, with the rest of the post containing supplemental information. This means that I have a VERY high bounce rate (91%) - 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. Sometimes two posts in a day, sometimes nothing for weeks.
  • I have several other blogs including a dedicated 'howto' blog where I post most of my instructional posts. I also have one for stuff near Blackheath, one to collect recipes that weren't too disastrous), not to mention 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 01:47 0 comments
    Labels: , ,

    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
    Labels: , , , ,

    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
    Labels: , ,

    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
    Labels: , ,

    Saturday, 26 October 2013

    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)

    246735








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    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.




    Posted by Jo at 14:47 0 comments
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    Saturday, 13 October 2012

    Blog stats for this blog - part three

    Updated 1 January 2013.

    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) <-- this post!

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

    For comparison I've had Google Analytics on my site since May/June 2010 and it says that from then until now this blog has had 88,628 unique visitors making 136,730 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...

    My blog has recently had a bit of an increase in page visits, as always mostly from Google searches. I do pimp some of my posts on Twitter and other places but Google traffic brings more visitors. This might be very different for other types of blogs of course.

    Previous blog hits for each month along with the number of posts written in that month. These stats come from Blogger's own inbuilt analytics, not Google Analytics which gives slightly different figures (though not dramatically different).

    May 2009 - 0 hits recorded (possibly because the Blogger analytics machine just started working around this time)
    A June 2009 - 0 - 2 posts
    B July 2009 - 3,632 - 4 posts
    C August 2009 - 3,236 - 6 posts
    D September 2009 - 3,384 -  9 posts
    E October 2009 - 3,369 - 14 posts
    F November 2009 - 6,336 - 4 posts
    G December 2009 - 3,394 - 6 posts

    2010 - inexplicably absent data (77 posts in total: 9,7,7,9[April]; 2,10,4,9[August]; 5,6,4,5[December])



    H January 2011 - 3,938 - 5 posts
    I February 2011 - 3,630 - 10 posts
    J March 2011 - 5,532 - 6 posts
    K April 2011 - 4,641 - 11 posts
    L May 2011 - 4,584 - 3 posts
    M June 2011 - 5,838 - 5 posts
    N July 2011 - 4,120 - 5 posts
    O August 2011 - 4,901 - 7 posts
    P September 2011 - 6,766 - 3 posts
    Q October 2011 - 6,813 - 6 posts
    R November 2011 - 7,982 - 11 posts
    S December 2011 - 7,226 - 18 posts



    January 2012 - 8,137 - 10 posts
    February 2012 - 8,475 - 11 posts
    March 2012 - 8,115 - 9 posts
    April 2012 - 7,672 - 5
    May 2012 - 10,318 - 16
    June 2012 - 11,191 - 9
    July 2012 - 12,646 - 14
    August 2012 - 15,251 - 11
    September 2012 - 19,031 - 14
    October 2012 - 9,719 (at 13 October 2012) - 7 posts so far
    November 2012 -28,292
    December 2012 - 32,422



    As you can see things started to increase a fair bit in July / August and I suspect that's to do with one blog post I wrote on 7 June 2012 called "What happens if you block someone on Twitter? What happens if they block you?" which, for my blog, has had a disproportionate number of hits (20,500+ in three and a half months / 57,800 in six months as of 1 Jan 2013), almost entirely from Google searches (judging from the incoming search logs). One or two other posts have had a few hundred or thousand visits (the ones on Nerdy Day Trips have been popular) but most of my 300+ blogs have between 30 and 200 visits and this just gradually increments over time.

    Funnily enough "Blog stats for this blog" version 1, published on 23 January 2011 has, at time of writing, 87 hits - I definitely didn't share the post on Twitter and I suspect if people are searching for 'blog stats' they're going to be looking for something other than how many hits my blog gets (in fact I doubt Google would even show my blog in the results).

    The second version, published on 30 December 2011 has 73 hits. Plenty of my blog posts have 150-160 views.

    My blog posts on MoreNiche affiliate marketing were also pretty popular (although not on the same scale as the post about Twitter blocking) and I still get a large number of incoming traffic for people searching for information about their products. Perennial favourites are my posts on organisations that employ science communicators.

    I don't really do anything with this blog stats information, other than to think 'oh that's nice' when numbers increase a bit. I'm pleased that the post about blocking on Twitter seems to be helpful. No plans to monetize the blog, this is just my hobby.
    Posted by Jo at 10:04 0 comments
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