modifoo

Where is this blog going?

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ekg For this blog, I used to employ PopStats to get an idea of how many readers I have. I learned that I had a solid readership of about 100 souls per day.

A while ago, another Blog recommended GetClicky, which I gave a shot. It turned out that that one gives totally different statistics than the other one. So when WordPress started offering statistics as well, I installed their plug-in. Might be not so surprising, but again, I get different numbers.

Blog statistics are no exact science

Taking the last week as an example, the following numbers pop up:

PopStats gives me a daily average of 126 visitors with 2618 hits, or roughly 20 hits per visitor.
GetClicky calculates an average of 31 visitors with 60 actions per day, or roughly 2 actions per visitor.
And the WordPress gives me 34 visitors per day, and doesn’t elaborate on the hits.

While I would love PopStats to be right, it seems more likely that I get just above 30 visitors a day. Not that the amount of people is so important to me, but these 30 visitors click on average only once before leaving again. Which suggest, that they do not find the content very interesting. Add to this the average number of comments per day (close to zero), and I start to wonder where this blog is going. Maybe it is beyond its half life?

Enjoyed 1003 times | Concieved 02-Dec-07 | Tags: blogging • frustration • path • statistics • tired

6 Responses to “Where is this blog going?”

Adrian
Posted: Dec 2nd, 2007 at 23:20

I may not comment regularly, but I subscribe to your RSS and read every one of your posts. If you are looking for more clickthroughs, perhaps you need to make your relevant content more noticeable. I’m no pro, and I’m certainly still learning blog copywriting, metrics and conversion, but I also might recommend more catchy post titles. I’m sure you are aware of Copyblogger.

BTW, there is a huge gap between your post and the comment form in Firefox 2.

Reply to this comment.

Hallvord R. M. Steen
Posted: Dec 3rd, 2007 at 09:56

Do any of these stats capture the number of RSS readers? If PopStats does it might explain the difference.

I’d guess that just a couple of clicks is
a) typical RSS-reading visitor behaviour (we already know your content, no need to browse)
b) typical blog-surfing behaviour (blogs are usually verbose stuff, can trap you forever if you start reading interesting things)

Some thoughts:
* stop redesigning. Find a look that works and stick to it.
* de-emphasize or remove technical mess (metafoo, search, RSS-promo)
* de-emphasize or remove some random parts (”recent posts”, “random posts”, “one year ago” (which is effectively same as “random”), “recent comments”) - OK for a front-page perhaps but seem very un-focused alongside every blog post
* promote categories. Give them catchier titles if possible. Show “previous 2 from this category” with excerpts alongside each post. “Recent comments” limited to “articles in this category” would be very interesting too.
* did I mention stop redesigning? I much preferred the first look - you and the camera. Instantly communicates that this is mostly a camera/film-focused personality site. The other designs have been more-or-less-pretty-but-generic.

And if possible: write more, link less :-p

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Hallvord R. M. Steen
Posted: Dec 4th, 2007 at 00:21

This blog is no longer in my hands and the people who have taken on the site (hi Tom and Mike ) have done a wonderful job - I just link to it as an example of what I think is a very well thought-through blog navigation.
http://www.woodlands.co.uk/blog/
Note how the right hand bar usually is relevant, linking to similar articles. The one-feature-image-per-post layout also works very nicely.

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Mike
Posted: Dec 5th, 2007 at 19:46

I read everything you post. Just because people don’t comment does not mean they are reading it. I get very few comments on my blog. I use Google Analytics to track the hits. You might look into using that as well. I truly hope you continue to post to the blog. I think Halvord’s comments above are relevant as well. No need to parrot his comments here