Traffic continues to ratchet up here on the blog. I had thought May was sort of run-of-the-mill, in terms of interesting news and lively discussions. I thought we’d be doing well to break 200,000 page views, which for the blog has been the absolute floor per month for a year now. That’s where we seemed to be headed about mid-month.
Then, I didn’t look at my stats until June had arrived, and I saw that we just broke a quarter of a million (253,331) for the fifth time. A happy surprise.
Apparently, this happened in large part because of three big days — big days by bradwarthen.com standards, that is, not by Drudge Report standards, or even Will Folks’. They were:
Basically, it was just a big finish to the month, since May 30 saw 9,859 page views, just falling short of five figures.
What’s the norm? Well, in May, the daily average (somewhat pulled up by those days) was 8,171. Over the past year, the lowest daily average was 6,768 in December, and the highest was 8,787 in January — the month of the SC presidential primary.
It’s gratifying to see things ratcheting up, but I remain puzzled sometimes by the spikes. I’m pretty sure that May 25 was my largest number of page views in one day ever. But when I go back and look what I posted that day, it seems unremarkable.
Do y’all have any idea what it was that drew all that traffic? This inquiring mind wants to know.
Related Posts
On May 25, I only posted once, and it was a so-so post, with a moderate response.
But I now see, going back, that I had posted some things that generated pretty good interest on the two previous days, such as this and this.
So maybe it was momentum from those days.
But really, those weren’t blockbusters.
I think I get fooled because I tend to think there’s a close correlation between comments and traffic. I tend to think that I would have to see a record number of comments for there to be record traffic.
But apparently, commenters and lurkers are not always attracted to the same things…
Are you counting unique views, or every time I click over to see if you’ve approved more comments?
Maybe posting a link to a Twitter feed for a guy with 100K followers helps?
Maybe. Social media is a big factor.
To Kathryn’s question — the latter. “Uniques” don’t mean anything to me, because when I started blogging on Typepad in 2005, the only stats available to me were page views. So that’s all I have for tracking my progress over time.
Frankly, I don’t fully understand all of the stats. For instance, I got 611,193 “hits” in May, and only 71,448 “views.” I think maybe “views” correlates to uniques, but I’m not sure.
Amid all this celebrating of big numbers, I worry whether they are accurate. The two or three times I’ve tried running Google Analytics, the numbers have been dramatically less than the ones I get from my stats service, which is something called “webalizer.”
I’m thinking Google Analytics just doesn’t work with the WordPress theme I’m using. Or maybe… my real stats are way lower than what I think they are.
I don’t think that’s the case, because the growth has been steady ever since I started blogging, using two or three different stats applications.
I hope, in my pending redesign, to effectively address the Google Analytics problem…
Let’s see:
16,715 views =
4000 Steven Davis
2000 bud
2000 Doug Ross
2000 Kathryn
2000 Silence
2000 Phillip
2000 Mark Stewart
715 Other
My website got a jump June 2nd. I hadn’t posted in 10 days. At the Time I think I was in Venice wrapping up the vacation.
“I don’t think that’s the case, because the growth has been steady ever since I started blogging, using two or three different stats applications.”
As far as benchmarks this is the key for me. As long as your comparing apples to apples this is showing growth and identifying trends. Also shows me what people are interested in and its good feedback on the quality of my writing.
Then again you sell adds so these numbers are more important to you for marketing reason.
I use squarespace. Not really a big fan. The journal entry tool is terrible.
Page views are defined in squarespace as full page loads. Hits may just be when someone clicks on a page.
Dunno, when there’s a hot topic, or you just aren’t approving comments very fast, I click over a lot. I’m not sure how valuable that would be to an advertiser…
Maybe they have to stay on the page a certain amount of time to be a view – implying they actually read a little bit of something. I bet that having Adam Baldwin’s name on the page helped run up the number. Probably some percentage are just fans that google his name and follow links.
It was me, I hit the page a bunch of times that day from unique IP addresses. That or the power of Firefly.
Doug – I think bud is above me. As long as Brad keeps me on the payroll, I’ll keep my post count up. But the day he stops…
Doug – I think I viewed more than 2000 times that day. I must be slipping.
I lurk alot, probably quickly looking at the page for comment updates three or four times a day. Nowhere near the top seven on Doug’s list though! I’m with Kathryn, too, in that sometimes I click over more often if you haven’t approved comments in awhile, just to see if there’s been an update.
Brad, do you have stats on people who post to back up Doug’s numbers, which might be fairly accurate. Those would be interesting to see. Mainly because I think there are only about a dozen people who regularly post on your blog.
Nope. I wish I did, but I don’t. Maybe if I required people to register before commenting, I’d have some data. But when I tried that back when I first started this blog, so many people complained of having trouble registering that I dropped it.
I don’t always post comments on bradwarthen.com, but when I do I raise the general level of discourse and enlighten liberal democrats.
I can tell you this, though, having looked back a few days…
Since Friday, the first of this month, the following 35 people have commented:
Silence
Bud
Kathy
Steven Davis II
Scout
Tavis Micklash
Bart
Susanincola
Kathryn Fenner
Tim
Steve Gordy
Jeff Morrell
David
Rose
Juan Caruso
Doug Ross
Andrew
DaveC
tired old man
Brandy
Ralph Hightower
Phillip
Maggie
Mark Stewart
Pat
Rick Noble
Gary Karr
Karen McLeod
Greg
Lynn
Bryan Caskey
Libb
Tom Doody
Barry
Lynn T
Most, but not all, are regulars.
Those who comment, of course, are a tiny minority of readers.
In that time, there have been approximately 48,000 page views. (I say approximately because today is incomplete, and I only get stats after the end of the day, so I’m estimating where we are at the moment. At the start of today, there were 40,085. Yesterday we had 10,499.)
Party time!
@Silence- ha. ha. Not sure I’ve been enlightened much by your non-financial comments….
Oh, Loard. i’m “other.”