{"id":242,"date":"2008-04-02T20:13:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T07:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=242"},"modified":"2008-04-02T20:13:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T07:13:00","slug":"5-thoughts-on-blog-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/5-thoughts-on-blog-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"5 thoughts on blog statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven’t yet worried about stats for this blog, but for our (academic) library blog<\/a> I keep a fairly close eye on what websites\/websearches our readers are coming from and what they’re doing once they get here.<\/p>\n

My favourite tool for blog statistics is StatCounter.com<\/a> – it gives you huge detail on the latest 500 hits for free, and it’s invisible. A few random things I’ve discovered as a result:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A google search for the name of our blog, or for the name of our library plus the word ‘blog’, brings us up at the top of the results – and people are finding us that way.\n<\/li>\n
  2. A really effective way to get hits is to post information on the blog on how to research the first assignment of the first year of university for a class of 700 students, and get the lecturer to put the link up on Blackboard<\/a> for them. We were getting well over 100 hits a day while that assignment ran – in the high two-digit figures of distinct visitors – about 10 times as many people as usual. And a month after the assignment was due, we’re still getting people coming from that link.\n<\/li>\n
  3. Another good way to get hits is to give a tutorial, then post a summary of the tutorial afterwards, and send the link out to them. Okay, if all this did was get hits it’d be worthless – might as well just send them the summary directly – but some of the people do browse around some of the other categories, and may even return another day…\n<\/li>\n
  4. Our statistics are<\/i> slowly growing. We usually get 10+ hits a day now, even though I’ve weeded out as many library staff as I can identify as staff, when it used to be less than 10 a day even including staff. Sometimes it’s even 10+ people a day….\n<\/li>\n
  5. The stats showed that someone had put a perfectly reasonable search term into the blog search box. I looked to see what results they’d have got and discovered it was just a dead end “0 results” results page, which didn’t seem very helpful, especially since I knew there was bound to be information about the topic somewhere on the main library website. So I wrote a hopeful email to our wonderful IT people, who wonderfully obliged me with this modification<\/a> (note the “library website” link automatically brings up results for whatever search the user tried on the blog. AskLive is our virtual reference, now running on a Meebo chatroom).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I haven’t yet worried about stats for this blog, but for our (academic) library blog I keep a fairly close eye on what websites\/websearches our readers are coming from and what they’re doing once they get here. My favourite tool for blog statistics is StatCounter.com – it gives you huge detail on the latest 500 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[162,40,147],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}