Metrics are fun. I am an engineer and fascinated with statistics. Therefore, I naturally have had my eye on how regular posting to my blog would correlate in terms of traffic and views. It is easy to look at metrics like: views per day, most popular posts, best days to post, best times to post, mobile vs. desktop viewers, & top referrers. As part of this blogging exercise, I thought it would be fun to measure these statistics. Based on the twitter feeds I have seen, others are also keeping an eye on their metrics, so I thought I would share what I have seen.
Trends after 1 week of regular blog posts:
Traffic Overview
Yes, as I post more there is definitely more traffic coming to the site. Mid-Week content seems to be getting more hits than the weekends or beginning of the week, however today's (Sunday) traffic is on the rise. Of course this could correlate directly to the content posted on a given day.
Mobile and Browser of Choice
Most people are using Chrome as their browser of choice. An average of 70% are browsing from their desktop, and 30% are viewing from their mobile phones.
Referrers
Twitter is the top referrer to my blog, followed closely by direct links. No surprise here as that is the medium that I have been using to promote my content, and I just recently started putting a few things up on LinkedIn to see what the effect of doing so would be. Perhaps there will be more repeat viewers as time goes on from people just hitting the site from RSS feeds.
popular Content
I have posted 3 DataGravity product related posts, which account for about a third of my views. The most popular post was the first product post entitled 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'. The most popular, non-product related posts are those in which I mentioned others specifically in the post which generated more buzz and visibility by those folks who were mentioned.
Time of Day
I seem to get more traction on posts that are posted mid to late afternoon, into early evening. Morning posts, despite having more time to promote and gain traction during the day, don't get the same amount of views as the later posts. I don't have a pretty graph to show this, but this is my field observation.
Gotta' love metrics - just like my stats professor taught me - 'Statistics can help you prove anything you want.' None the less, they are fun to take a look at.
