Blog Site Stats

Well, in the interest of full disclosure and perhaps some blogucation for others wanting to run or optimize thier blog, I am giving some site stat summaries from my first 5 months in real existence.  Note this only includes the web site, not the Feedburner Feed, which is a real limitation.  FYI right now I have about 10-12 "subscribers" to the feed, a third of which are some kind of search engine or aggregator.  All stats here were generated by Google Analytics:

Date of first post: October 20, 2007

Total posts to date: 45

Total pageviews to date: 1,516

Total Unique views to date: 1,099 (much more important, unique views disregards multiple same-page loads by the same visitor)

 

Visitor Trends:

Late October an initial bump with 50 unique visits the first week

Second Week: 39 visits

Third through Seventh weeks: about 13-15 visits/week

Slow increase in visits through late December

Week of Jan 21st had 89 visits

Week of Jan 27 - 148 visits

Week of Feb 4 - 144 visits

Week of Feb 11 - 123 visits

Week of Feb 18 - 193 visits so far!

 

Popular Content:

Although this is primarily a running blog, the most attention by far has been from two articles on non-running subjects.  I guess that goes to show us runners are still in a miniscule minority on the web, and even a runner blogging about John McCain or medical software will still get more hits than a runner blogging about running.  Interesting philosophically but also a good tool if you're interested in getting your site some new visitors.  I never really meant the blog to be only about running, it's just what I mostly interested in spending my free time writing about.  Notice nearly 2/3 of visits come for two articles that are not running related.  All of the top pages reference other things or people.  One is a semi-scientific article with a reference to a full text scientific report.  Bottom line is if you want to get hits then reference things.  People are more interested in your thoughts about things than just your thoughts.

• ImageJ: Freeware DICOM viewer for PC, 10/25/07, 32% of all visits
• McCain's Darn Parotid Gland, 2/6/08, 30% of all visits
• Calories Burned Running Hills, 1/27/08, 12%
• Update: Out with the 101, 2/29/07, 8%
• ING Georgia Marathon & Half, 1/14/08, 4%

Visitor Loyalty:

• 76% visited once and never returned
• 11% visited 2-8 times
• 3% visited 9-25 times
• 3% visited 26-50 times
• 4% visited >50 times

Traffic Sources:

I was added to the CRN running blog network, bloglines.com, and technorati.com in late October, so it's tough to see an impact those made.  Jan 27th I was listed to BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog.  I have since dropped MyBlogLog.  I also added and dropped Romlet in late January.

• Google search, 52% of all visits
• Directly typing in the web URL, 13%
• Blogger.com, 8%
• sideeffectsmayvary.wordpress.com, 5%
• blogcatalog.com, 4%
• CRN Running Blog Network, 3%
• Direct links from other bloggers' blogrolls, about 10% total

Sorry for the long one!  Hope this provides some insight into starting a blog.  Despite trying to gain readership probably the most fun part is reading the comments from other runners.  So it's not all about the numbers...