Okay, the thing is… and this is a thing I have talked about before… but I am a self-confessed stat monkey. Not only because I feel that it somehow validates the insane amount of time I spend writing and doing funny pictures, but also because, according to the book: ‘Getting Published For Idiots’, given to me by my wife when I first started trying to self-publish my books, a popular blog is a selling point to literary agents and publishers… (Oh, and I am also trying to conquer the world)…
So I pay a lot of attention to my stats… and not only because I am self-centered, egotistical and shallow… and I do not like what my stats are telling me.
I know that we all have good days and bad…
I know things fluctuate…
I was on my stats page, and I hit the ‘days’ button, like I always do, just to see how many people had come to see me today, and where they were all from…
109 views, 37 visitors- not bad for a Sunday, which is historically a slow day… and people from all over the world, that is always nice… (I actually use my stats world map like a game of ‘Risk’, trying to conquer the entire globe… and there is no feeling quite like that magic day where you first get a hit from China, and a big chunk of the world gets filled in with color… or you get a hit from some small country you didn’t even know existed)…
(I don’t think this map is accurate for the life of my entire blog, it might just be one year, but you get the idea… ooooh… I finally got Greenland!!! But I think I have had way more than 11,824 total hits from the U. S.)
After looking at today’s stats, and seeing if I had a hit from some new country, I scanned the rest of the single day bars going back a week or so… like I do… It is a crazy graph, with highs and lows, but about average… I had one day with:
27 views from 21 visitors… (well, that sucks)
And one day with:
208 views from 43 visitors… (I rock!!!)
(I had one day, early on in my blog, where I got over 3,000 views, and I still don’t know what I did that day… maybe WordPress just uses a computer randomizer and makes all these stats up)
Then I clicked the ‘week’ button, and did the same thing… with similar results…
One week had:
234 views from 204 visitors
Another week had:
1,200 views from 234 visitors
I don’t usually look at the ‘weeks’, and I rarely look at the months… but then I noticed the ‘years’ button, and realized that I hadn’t hit that for a long time… if ever… so I did…
And this is where it gets weird… I mean, I know our ‘followers’ number always goes up, except in the rare instance where somebody ‘unfollows’ us… and I am fully aware that just because some one is still following you that they might not still be looking at your blog… or even be alive… and this gives us a false sense of security… as if we are constantly getting more popular…
So, imagine my surprise, when I hit the ‘years’ button, to find this…
2012- 30,689 views, 544 visitors
2013- 44,532 views, 8,713 visitors
2014- 53,851 views, 10,608 visitors… so far, so good, right, a steady rise… and then… wait… WTF??? The next bar is SHORTER!!!
2015- 43,360 views… what the hell… that is less than the year before, and the year before that!!!… the only good news is that there were- 11,030 visitors… which is higher than those other years… phew!… wait… am I going up or down??? I am so confused…
It is too early to tell what this year brings. Maybe it will kick ass, and I am worrying for nothing. Either that, or people are reading less… or less people are reading more… or… something!!!???!!!
One last word on stats…
Why is it that the one stat WordPress claims not to keep track of is the number of comments on a single post. You all know I have that post where we are trying to break the record for the most comments on a non-celebrity blog post… but how can we know when we break the record if they won’t tell us what the record is???
This seems fishy to me.
I think we broke that record… that post has 44,332 responses on it… and even if half of those are my replies to your comments and replies, we still did pretty good… sigh.
***A final note***
What I do know is this… the vast majority of my views, visits and comments come from a select few of you that continue to visit my blog… and for that… I am eternally grateful!!!
It is for, loyal friends, that I continue to do… uh… whatever the hell it is I do around here…
Thanks.
***(Stat Monkey is actually a picture from my children’s book: ‘I Like Monkeys’, which I use now and then, changing the words on the sign to suit the new post… This book, and many others, are available, over there to the right—>, in my sidebar, by clicking on the pictures of my books… just sayin’)***
Pouring My Art Out 