Picture
My last post was all about blog comments and increasing my blog traffic.  I created this graph to show my unique visitors as Weebly reports them.  You can definitely see where on May 10 and 21 I shared my blog on Facebook.  But I was talking to my younger sister about my logic and she informed me about a program by Google called Analytics that would track not only how many people were stopping by, but how long they were staying for.

She pointed out that although 80 people may have stopped by my blog, the amount of time they stayed is more important because that can tell me if they were actually reading my blogs.  Which she also informed me was unlikely due to my lack of images.  Talk about tough love, but I value her input because she has studied up on this stuff and has created a blog of her very own.  She also suggested I rename and reorganize my tabs so that my blog is the first page people see.  I followed her suggestions and will hopefully be able to see if people are actually reading my posts.  And as of right now, I am the only one who has viewed my page.  I guess this also proves the theory that posting new material helps.

5/23/2012 04:55:44 pm

Thanks for sharing this information, yeah it sucks when family bursts your bubble but I am glad to have this information as a way of accurately tracking who visits my website and how long they stay. I was wondering does this tool track visitors who read your posts through their reader? I'm not sure if those readers would be tracked anyways but it's something to think about.

Reply
5/24/2012 02:20:59 am

It's a weird thing. These blogs are about publishing, they're about audience at the same time we know that's not all their about. I worry too many people are only interested in views and numbers and forget the real reason for blogging. That said, we certainly can benefit from traffic and it's one metric for judging influence and success. I suppose it's the same with grading in schools. We need to provide many avenues and ways for people to judge success and ultimately allow individuals to make that call. The great thing about this platform is the myriad of uses and purposes.

Reply
5/24/2012 03:08:15 am

I actually thought about this idea of tracking blog traffic last night. Megan, I don't think it tracks blog reads from Google Reader, so my system is flawed that way. I also questioned my intentions of my blog; is it to get as many reads as possible, or simply to share my views on things I feel are important? Blogging isn't my career and so I have decided that the amount of traffic it generates is of less importance to me than getting my views off my chest and hopefully onto someone else's. And anything that happens after that is really just icing on the cake.

Reply



Leave a Reply.