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 blogstats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogstats. 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












Friday, 30 December 2011

Blog stats for this blog part two

I wrote a post on the stats for this blog back in January 2011 and thought I'd update things. Despite a mild worry that it's a bit like saying "here's how much money I've got in the bank" I thought it might be of interest to others, and it will be of interest to me this time next year - I don't really know how my stats compare for an average blog. 

As observed in the previous post I seem to get random hits mostly from Google and this appears to be 'long tail' stuff in that each post gets a gradual increase in the number of hits overall but there's nothing too dramatic, bar one or two popular posts. And of course Google's own spiders visit my blog and crawl everything so I suspect quite a lot of the hits are non-living readers.

The blog itself is a bit of a mish-mash and isn't really about anything in particular - I'm glad I gave it an appropriate title at least. I suppose overarching themes might include skepticism, jobs in science communication, Twitter tools, nerdy pursuits and cinema but there's some random stuff in there too. I think if you were trying to build an audience or a niche you might want a blog that is a bit more coherent but I like to think the internet has enough space for everyone.

The picture below shows the number of hits per month, I've added in the letters myself, but it doesn't appear to have any information about stats in 2010. I believe these are pageviews rather than visitors (individual people) but I haven't delved too much into it.















From my previous post on this it appears that this information started to become available from within Blogger (without having to visit Google Analytics) in July 2010 so I'm doubly surprised that 2010 info is absent, but each spot reads as follows.

May 2009 - 0 and 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 - 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 - 4,899 so far (25 December 2011) - 14 posts (so far)

At the time of writing (30 December 2011) the December 2011 total has recently increased to 6795 and the number of blog posts written this month is at 16 (this will be the 17th). Much of this spike is due to a small prophecy coming true, about the PR for a product called Nuratrim ;)

Edit: 5 February - final tallies for December 2011 and January 2012
December 2011 - 7,226 - 18 posts
January 2012 - 8,137 - 10 posts

Some of my posts I mention on Twitter a few times because I really want people to see them or know about something - eg my post on tools for Twitter, but with some others I don't bother as they might just be things I want to record for myself for later. In either case the majority of any hits come from Google keywords (as a librarian I suppose I am at least fairly good at titling and tagging my posts correctly, when I remember to do it that is) rather than from following a link on Twitter, however the blog post that indirectly led to the NerdyDayTrips.com map is an exception as it was tweeted by Ben G and so there are a couple of spikes there that relate to that. In short, for most of my posts tweeting about them doesn't make that much of an impact, but occasionally it does. All my blog posts are also fed into FriendFeed and I expect I will get around to migrating my Blogger profile to Google+ profile, although I don't really use G+ at the moment.

The most popular posts are below (Google Analytics suggests that the numbers are higher, in fact I'm not entirely sure how to marry up the disparity in figures between Blogger Analytics and Google Analytics (remembering that Blogger is owned by Google)) with their pageviews.

24 Oct 2010, 7 comments
8,684 Pageviews
5 Jun 2010, 3 comments
8,575 Pageviews
24 Jul 2009, 8 comments
7,716 Pageviews
11 Apr 2010, 4 comments
4,114 Pageviews
30 May 2011, 5 comments
3,992 Pageviews

Ironically I stopped promoting "How to find old tweets" (because it's out of date and superseded by "A list of tools..." however an awful lot of people seem to be searching in Google for that and so that's the one that brings them to the blog. See my earlier point on tagging.