More Blog Statistics
At the beginning of last month I gave you a look into this blog’s statistics. It was then that I decided to post on a daily basis and see whether that would bring more visitors to the blog. It’s time to face up to reality now and see if my strategy worked, so let’s see how well my traffic fared compared to previous months. Has the daily-posting routine achieved the desired effect? To be honest, posting daily is quite draining and time consuming, so I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with it in the future. First, let’s take a look at the number of visits. Here’s a screenshot of the AWSTATS plugin I use to monitor traffic:
There was indeed a rise in the number of visits (excluding the March anomaly, which I still can’t explain). Why is it that the number of unique visitors increased by about 30% while the number of pages viewed increased by 100%? I’m not sure. In terms of unique visitors 1768 amounts to about 60 people per day, which isn’t bad, but since I aim for world domination there’s still a ways to go.
Here are some of the popular search key phrases that brought people to this site:
Interestingly the search terms follow a fat tails distribution, meaning that most of the visits come from the less common phrases. Put another way, there isn’t one phrase or keyword that brings people to this site; it’s lots of little different searches. If you add up all the contributions from the less frequent keywords you end up with something much more significant than, say, “guide to writing a physics engine”, which is the most popular phrase (but accounts for a mere 4.3%). Incidentally, the same thing is true for Amazon.com. They make most of their money not from bestsellers but from the more specialized, less glamorous publications.
However, all this is meaningless, since most visits to this site aren’t the result of using a search engine anyway! Even fewer end up via external links. Most people simply end up on the page by using a bookmark or typing in its name. Does this mean that most of my readers are return readers? I wish there was some way of finding this out:
If you’re a fellow blogger I’d love to hear about your stats. Drop a comment to this thread and tell us about it.
I read the RSS feed. I don’t know how that’s reflected, but I only click through to the site in order to leave a comment. You may be undercounting your daily readers by quite a bit.
My stats aren’t terribly interesting yet, I’ve only been going for a couple of months. My old site got the most hits using vaguely pornographic post titles. That’s the internet for ya!
I also usually read your site from the RSS feed.
It has been a rather uphill battle for me as my blog does not fall into a particular niche, which is, I think, your strong suit. Your audience is clearly defined and tend to be a rather enthusiastic bunch (judging from the few mathematicians I’ve had beers with).
I’m glad to see this blog is doing so well, and will not let my bitterness keep me from returning.
jbrydle: I think those stats up there do count hits on the RSS feed.
Chris: your site looks amazing! I wasn’t aware of it, but I’ve added it to my blogs list, and I’ll see if I can figure what it’s about. How did a bass player end up on a physics/math blog?
Assaf,
Your statistics counter counts RSS feeds? That is fairly impressive… I know mine doesn’t, so a couple of my regular readers hardly show up on my radar at all (I know this for sure because I’m friends with a couple of them in the real world…).
Anyway, what you say about the lots of little random things having a bigger contribution than any one thing is certainly true for my blog as well, although for some reason the term ‘propulgate’, various searches related to the game Diplomacy, and top-down processing searches manage together to constitute the majority of my random search hits.
I think it does count RSS feeds, and I know for sure it excludes robots/crawlers.
One thing I didn’t show is that about 77% of all my visitors leave after 0-30 seconds. Not so impressive anymore :).
Amazing, I didn’t know about that till now. Thankz!
cross stitch