Mainly I did this to challenge myself to break through my own laziness, but I also thought it'd be interesting to see how it would affect my subjects and readership. Not that I'll be incorporating any of these findings into how I write from now on -- this blog is about what I want to write, right? -- but it'll at least serve as a warning to the rest of you.
If you're interested, you can download the raw statistics of post day/view count/time here.
To begin, here's a chart showing how the month went:
As the chart shows, there seems to be such a thing as oversaturation, It could be that my writing deteriorated, or people just got sick of seeing my links show up on Facebook. Or it could be a coincidence, or there could be some external factors at work. But there's a clear downward trend in views, even though we have that nice spike in the middle.
There were a total of 2,056 views in the past month; this is compared to an overall total of about 7,000 views since I began the blog. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a "view" is considered every page that a visitor looks at; in this case, each post counts as a page. So there are opportunities for the same page being viewed twice to be counted in these scores, and although Blogger does include an option to not track the author's views, I had not turned it on. I usually load each post at least once, just to be sure it looks good, so consider that.
So that's about 29% of my total views in one month, which sounds pretty good by itself; however, my blog has a total of 64 posts (not counting this one). So that's 29% of views in 47% of the posts, which is...not great. In fact, none of my September posts made it into my top-ten most viewed posts (#1 is my first post about my trip to Germany, which currently stands at 96 views). My #10 most viewed post is my third post about Germany, which has 55 views currently.
My most viewed post from September is at 49 views right now; the least viewed post only has 17, and is, in fact, my lowest-viewed post ever. I guess you guys don't like poetry as much as I thought, and like video games a whole lot.
Interestingly, there seems to be no connection between the likes I received on Facebook for a given post and the number of views I received: the top most viewed received the most likes, but no comments, and the second top most viewed received the most comments, but only one like. This isn't to say that no other posts had comments or likes; several did, but the correlation was low.
I only considered likes, rather than +1s, because Facebook is the traffic source of about half my traffic, which is as much as all other sources put together.
And here's a list of where in the world my traffic is coming from, sorted by number of views in September:
I can guess who my readers are except for France, Serbia, Russia, and Thailand. Who are you guys?
I think I'll do another blog-every-day next September, for maximum control in the experiment. It'll be awesome to compare the statistics next year! Let me know if there's any analysis I missed, or if there's more information you'd like me to gather for analysis! My blog turns six months old in ten days, and it's been a wonderful ride so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment