Published on 11 October, 2008
in blogging.
Back in February I promised to take another look at my blog statistics after six months. Well, it has been longer than that…but in the interim I had stopped blogging with the start of my new job this Spring. Now, six months into new job, I belatedly returned and updated the original post with data for four months — from analytics install through the week after my last post. Here is the visual that goes with that:
Google Analytics charts
The spike in March is from my 43 Knowledge Management Definitions post, which since I stopped blogging has still seen 1300+ views, just slightly behind the more surprising favorite New Employee Orientation post. As I prepare to now walk away from this blog, it does give me some satisfaction that people are still visiting — as I’ve seen the same traffic in the past 5 months of absolutely no blogging, as I did in the previous 4 months pictured above. Hopefully I have left some small piece of enduring value behind. With this in mind, I’ll pay for another year of hosting to keep this site alive.
Well, there you have it. Now I feel I can otherwise sign-off.
Published on 3 February, 2008
in blogging.
I was nudged into installing Google Analytics by Tony Karrer with his attempt at setting off a blog statistics meme. I don’t believe my blogging objectives (my own learning, paying it forward, establishing credibility, attracting a network, etc.) are much directly guided by these sorts of statistics, but I decided to play along, being a bit of sucker for data and data analysis.
What follows is a summary of other reports from links in Tony’s post and where I come out after only my first two weeks (screen shot below). Note to self: update mine in 6 months when I have a more meaningful sample size. Note to others: I’m making no claim at all that relative positioning equates to value.
- Page Views per Visit: (more is better)
- Bounce Rate: (less is better)
- Manish Mohan: 66%
- Tony Karrer: 67%
- Me: 73% [Update for 21 January - 21 May: 72%]
- Tracy Hamilton: 75%
- Karl Kapp: 76%
- Clark Quinn: 78%
- Lee Kraus: 79%
- Dave Taylor: 81%
- Nancy White: 82%
- Average Time on Site: (more is better)
- Manish Mohan: 3:02
- Tony Karrer: 2:12
- Karl Kapp: 2:02
- Clark Quinn: 1:13
- Me: 1:11 [Update for 21 January - 21 May: 1.40]
- Lee Kraus: 1:08
- Tracy Hamilton: 1:01
- Nancy White: 1:00
- Dave Taylor: 0:59
- % New Visits: (less is better assuming that perceived value from previous visits leads readers to come back; although I could argue that attracting new is also good and/or just an indicator of writing about more broadly popular topics that attract Search.)
- Manish Mohan: 65%
- Tony Karrer: 72%
- Clark Quinn: 72%
- Karl Kapp: 74%
- Lee Kraus: 84%
- Dave Taylor: 87%
- Nancy White: 88%
- Tracy Hamilton: 88%
- Me: 95% [Update for 21 January - 21 May: 84%]
- % From Search Engines (less is better if assume that ‘Search’ is all the rest, with ‘referring’ and ‘direct access’ the even more desired traffic)
- Manish Mohan: 11%
- Harold Jarche: 16% (caveat: from other than Google Analytics)
- Clark Quin: 36%
- Matt Cutts: 37%
- Lee Kraus: 42%
- Tracy Hamilton: 53%
- Tony Karrer: 54%
- Karl Kapp: 54%
- Rich Hoeg: 56%
- Me: 67% [Update for 21 January - 21 May: 52%]
- Nancy White: 71%
- % From Referring Site (more is better in the sense of attracting linklove)
- Harold Jarche: 61% (caveat: from other than Google Analytics)
- Lee Kraus: 45%
- Matt Cutts: 41%
- Clark Quinn: 40%
- Manish Mohan: 34%
- Tony Karrer: 31%
- Karl Kapp: 29%
- Tracy Hamilton: 29%
- Me: 24% (not surprising in that I’ve been pretty inactive the last few months and my more recent focus on KM + L&D convergence hasn’t drawn attention like my earlier personal learning environment writing) [Update for 21 January - 21 May: 33%]
- Rich Hoeg: 22%
- Nancy White: 17%
Closing notes:
- I wonder about the validity of at least the ‘Time per Visit’ and ‘Bounce Rate’ in that I notice some of my own behavior in preparing this post. In one case, being on Tony’s site an inordinate length of time as I clicked through to sites linked there. In the other case, as I verified functionality of the links above, creating ‘bounces’ for those people.
- I was surprised at how many of my visits are from google.images referrals, at close to 10% of my total visits. A hint might come from this recently published JISC paper: “…about 40% of school search engine users found BL Learning using an image search, suggesting a preference for this kind of retrieval” (p.14) Here is an example of what might be going on: the Hillary Youth blog (yes, that Hillary) lifted the question mark image from my year old post on “know why”. Should I be thankful for the link unintentionally inflating my Technorati Authority, and/or should I be bummed that my effort to appropriately credit photos is largely lost?
- A majority of my traffic in this brief period is from search terms related to ‘learning objectives’ and ‘new hire training’. From my older content, the most frequent search attractor is the term ‘del.icio.us’.
- After all this, I can’t claim I have anything actionable beyond just trying to continue to write quality content that drives my own learning, is potentially valuable to others, and serves as an ePortfolio — in roughly equal proportion.
- To Tony’s tagging, I add two bloggers that especially inspire me: Cammy Bean and Michele Martin. Both have fairly visual sites, so I’m in-part curious if they also get significant traffic from image searches.
