Lies, damn lies, and statistics
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
My colleague Nick Reynolds (who, until recently, I’ve always called “Nick Reynolds-AM&i” owing to his previous name on the internal email list) posts a rather plaintive comment after reading his Wordpress statistics…
Wordpress‘ stats give me a live update of how many hits I’m getting and where the traffic is coming from. And because the numbers are very low it’s much easier to get a quick snapshot sense of what’s going on. And when I say low I mean low. My blog really is at the very end of the long tail. Somedays the tail doesn’t wag at all, and I get no hits whatsoever. My best day ever has been 350 hits (mainly due to a link from Biased BBC). Tiny numbers.
Hmm. Some people post their stats every month in all their gory detail. I’ve shied away from this so far; but Nick’s post made me go and take a peek.
The stats for this blog, in case you’re interested, were 11,000 page impressions in the last month; and the highest day was 543. That’s not much different from Nick’s highest, frankly - and I’ve had a blog for years! However, items in my RSS feed has been read a further 8,000 times (there have been 2,250 clicks from my RSS feed to my content). Combining the two, I therefore had 16,750 “unique views” in total, so that’s an average of 558 ‘hits’ per day. Just like radio’s multiplatform, so are blogs, too.
So it seems that I’ve got 550 people reading my blog every day. They’re clearly the 550 cleverest people in the world. Or, more likely, they can’t get onto any other websites. Call your IT department, quick, people.
Photo: Heather. Used under licence.
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