Ambassador of Books ~ Book Club Madam ~ Blogger Gal

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

A Year In Stats

Back on June 11, 2008 I started using Google Analytics to track my blog's stats. Just for fun I decided to look back at my stats for one year and see what interesting things I find.
  • I had a total of 12,122 visitors during the year 06/11/08 to 06/11/09. Those visitors came from 113 countries or territories and they visited a total of 21,079 times.

  • The average reader spend 1.29 minutes on my blog per visit.

  • My first tracking month I had about 40 visitors per day, but it could be as few as 14 or as many as 79. That same month this year I averaged 50 per day with variances between 27 and 96. (This doesn't include subscribers who read my blog through Google Reader or another service.)

  • In that year I had two days with lots more visitors than any other days. My guest post by Laurie R. King drew in 213 readers in one day and my list of my favorite posts for last year's Book Blogger Appreciation week brought in 179 in one day.
I also looked at the posts that have gotten the most attention over the past year. These are the top posts that people arrive at through searches or continue to visit for various reasons. Here are the top 5 most popular from this first year of stat tracking:
  1. author Laurie R. King's first guest post
  2. the list of books my book club has read
  3. my review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - this is the one that gets searched for the most
  4. the list of books I reviewed last year
  5. author Laurie R. King's second guest post
Personally I find these results fascinating. I love seeing what interests people and why the visit - and return - to my blog. At this point I haven't given any thought to how I can use these stats to improve my blog ... I'm just having fun KNOWING this stuff.

How about you? Do you use a stat tracker? Which one? Do you use the results to change your blog in any way? If you don't track and don't want to, why not? I'd love you hear you thoughts on this.





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10 comments:

Regina said...

Hi Heather! First, thanks for stopping by the Leakey Faucet. We really did have a lot of fun on our "Dorks in Forks +2" adventure. Since I was one of the "+2" I can't tell you the good stuff about Forks and the Olympic Peninsula...but I'm sure Mandy will be blogging all about it soon. They had a great time.

As for tracking, I've been researching tracking options. I think I'm going to try the Google solution, since it links into the other google things I use. (Like Blogger for instance *wink*). I think it will be interesting to pay a little more attention to who's visiting, and what people are interested in reading. It might help me become a better blogger. (Or not. After all, I'm not going to be anything but myself. *grin)

Hope you have a great day!

Jenny said...

How cool! How do you sign up for google analytics?

Heather J. @ TLC Book Tours said...

Regina - I read your post about taking the stand-by flights - what an adventure! As for Google Analytics, it is easy to use. Definitely try it out.

Heather J. @ TLC Book Tours said...

Jenny - it's is really easy - I'll post the instructions in a separate comment below so everyone can find them easily.

Heather J. @ TLC Book Tours said...

*** HOW TO SIGN UP FOR GOOGLE ANALYTICS ***

Go to this website: http://www.google.com/analytics/

On the top right you'll see "Sign Up Now". Just follow the instructions and you'll be done!

Anonymous said...

Using wordpress does not give me the option to use google analytics for stats. So I just refer to my wordpress stats which simply gives me number of visitors on every post everyday. It also gives me month wise and year wise detail. But that's about it and I don't think I'm interested in more than that. Too much work with wordpress :)

Now I don't worry about stats anymore although I do see them every alternate day. I love to see the search terms though, it's fun :)

bermudaonion said...

I do think stats like that are fascinating. I'm on wordpress like violetcrush, so I can't use Google Analytics. I do use sitemeter and clustrmaps to help make up the difference.

Rebecca Reid said...

It's lots of fun to look at stats!

Suey said...

Fun look at your stats. I too use Google Analytics, and in fact, I think my year mark just went by too. I 'll have to look and compare and maybe share.

Nan said...

Nope, I don't read any stats. I don't have a clue how many visit or from where or what interests them. :<) I come visit you regardless of what your topic is!

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