As I said back in March, I have a fair bit of knowledge about you, my readers. While I enjoy writing, and a lot of the posts on this blog have been highly useful to me, it is good to know that there are people who read it who are not, well, me. To get word out there about new posts, I use the following channels:
- Google +
- RSS
- Tumblr
Whenever a new post is published, it is also automatically posted to all of these. That covers spreading the word, now on to analytics. LinkedIn lets me see how many people click on a link I post, right on the front page, which is useful. Other than that, I have a number of dashboards I use:
- Twitter has analytics.twitter.com, where I see both impressions, engagements and engagement rate
- Google Analytics (avaliable at analytics.google.com), is enabled on the blog, and also tells me a number of things
- The Google AdSense dashboard (available at google.com/adsense/) is also useful
- WordPress’ JetPack Stats
- Finally, I get subscriber numbers from feedburner.google.com
So, what do these dashboards tell me? According to Twitter, my tweets get few impressions (somewhere on the order of 25-50), and no engagement whatsoever (unless they are retweeted by someone else, or involve something controversial). Google Analytics (which is set up to ignore me whenever I visit) tells me that I have an average of twelve to fifteen thousand monthly readers, of which six point three per cent are repeat visitors. Most visit using computers (about 85 %), followed by tablets (about 10%) and smartphones (about 5%). The pages per session rate is at 1.08%, which means that 1.08% of users move beyond the first page they hit.
All of that tracks closely with the data I get from Google AdSense, and I have a high rate of confidence in the accuracy of that data. The data from Google Analytics and AdSense are borne out in the data from JetPack, and the differences in the data is small enough to be of no importance.
As for geography, the data stacks up as follows (approximate numbers, top five countries only):
- United States (35%)
- United Kingdom (9%)
- India (8%)
- Australia (5%)
- Germany (4%)
The five most popular posts are:
- Fixing “The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship”
- Spelling it out – using the NATO phonetic alphabet to our advantage
- Lotus Notes: Resolving “File Already Exists” issues
- How to print booklets from your Mac
- Exporting a list of all computers from Active Directory
Rounding out the knowledge I get from automated sources, is the number of subscribers to the RSS feed, of which there are, on average 53. Finally there is the data you gave me in the survey. That is to say, that’s what I was planning on writing about at this point in the post. There’s only one problem, which is that the survey only got four responses. I will make another survey towards the end of the year, to see if we can learn something then.
At this point, I’m sure you may be wondering why I have written this post? Well, there are a few reasons for that. First, I wanted to take a look at the data, and see what I could learn from it. Second, I want there to be some transparency involved in your readership of the blog, and I feel that this post goes a long way to address that. I am planning on revisiting this data at more or less regular intervals, probably as part of my annual roundup article.
As usual, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comment field below.
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