Six Month Review

Today marks 6months since I began this diversion into Blogdom. It has been an interesting experience. I love numbers so let’s take a look:

At the 3 month mark things looked like this:

• 1174 Unique Visitors
• 76 RSS Feeds
• 4861 Pageviews
• 216 Comments
• 114 Non-Spam Comments

Now, 3 months later we have:

• 4583 Unique Visitors
• 403 RSS Feeds
• 66,745 Pageviews
• 708 Comments
• 207 Non-Spam Comments

On first impression, it looks good. 4x the number of visitors and RSS feeds. 13x the number of pageviews. Quite a jump.

But I think it’s the non-spam comments that tell the true story. It held steady at about 100 in 3 months. If we compare these numbers from Statpress app I have installed to the Google Analytic numbers we see:

• 1,078 Unique Visitors
• 3,377 Pageviews

That is a quarter the amount. How do we get such drastically different numbers? Well, it comes down to what you count as a visitor. My understanding is that Google filters out bots and people that load for an incredibly short amount of time. So, I would say Google is more indicative of genuine visitors. Something else that might help demonstrate that; the total number of banned IP’s that have been blocked is 7,999. So, eight thousand times spam IP’s have attempted to access the site, after being sufficiently annoying to get banned. That gives a good idea where the 63,000 difference in pageviews is.

Now, for more fun data, let’s look at search terms and referrers:

Compare these to Googles data:

The search terms are pretty similar. But the refers is drastically different. Google has filtered out all the spam sites that link here and just summarize real people. People clicking on links I post in Facebook is the clear winner. Followed once again by links from The Ancient Gaming Noob.  The others mainly come from comments I’ve made on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog and guild/gaming sites I am a member of (STO Vets and d20radio).

What do I take away from all these numbers? Mostly, that Google seems more reliable than Statpress. That, and people will visit the site from a variety of sources, but not many come back on a regular basis. And SWTOR tags are the only main way strangers seem to find the site through search engines.

But I don’t write for the visitors (though, now that my books out, I wouldn’t complain about more people visiting and discovering the book and then buying it). This blog is just kind of a fun outlet for me to talk about whatever I want.

Oh, and spammers still suck.