This blog by the numbers

April 1 is the first day of the new tax year in New Zealand (no foolin’), so I thought I’d look at some numbers of my own today—blog numbers.

I don’t usually pay attention to stats for this blog or any of my other sites, but sometimes I get curious about things like what’s most popular, whether promotion on social networks has any value, those sorts of things.

I’ve had StatCounter tracking statistics for most of the time this blog has existed. Blogger itself has counted stats from the very beginning. Google Analytics counts stuff, too. They all measure things differently and give different information. To get a fuller picture of what’s going on with this blog, I have to consult all three. Here’s some of what I learned.

Aside from Google itself, and internal referrals from one page on the blog to another, the number one site for referring visitors in the past month was Roger Green’s blog. Considering how much we interact and talk about each other’s posts, that’s probably to be expected, but I still think it’s interesting.

Speaking of Google searches, stats tell me that the most popular search word for people who end up here is amerinz. That makes sense, since if one didn’t know the blog’s URL, how else would they find it? However, I assume the people that search for amerinz.blogspot.com merely type that in the wrong place—at least, I hope that’s the case.

In the past couple weeks, other popular searches bringing people here have been about topics I actually blogged about: “Michelle Shocked” (here and then again here), “rosa parks” and her bus (on the centenary of her birth), “15th gayest city Auckland” (that one was back in 2009). But there was also “According to HRC, why aren't ‘civil unions’ enough for same-gender couples?”, which I did not blog about—though I have addressed the more general topic, especially in this blog post last year.

For me, pageviews are among the most useless information I get because the numbers just don’t tell me much. That’s because numbers for specific posts, as I’ve noted before, are sometimes skewed by spambots. For example, my most-viewed blog post of all time is the one about the use of the lower case omega (I don’t want to put the title in this post or it might attract bots, too). Nevertheless, it turns out that among my more viewed posts are also many found through popular searches, like those above, and also my recent post on the Auckland earthquake a couple weeks back.

I also found out some traffic does indeed come in through social media, but Google Analytics only counts Twitter. This means that it doesn’t include visitors coming from Netwoked Blogs, which is where my Facebook readers come from (it’s the only place where that link goes, since I turned off the Twitter version because I didn’t like it). That’s actually generally a bigger number. You can also follow this blog directly through that service.

To end this stroll through numbers, how about seem truly geeky stats? According to Google Analytics, the top ten mobile devices accessing this blog are: 1. Apple iPhone: 67.11%; 2. Unknown: 7.89%; 3. Samsung GT-I9300 Galaxy S3: 5.26%; 4. Tie: Apple iPod, Motorola MOTXT912B Droid Razr 4G and Nokia Lumia 800, each with 2.63% and 7. Tie: Apple iPad, HTC A8183 Desire, HTC Desire and HTC z710a Sensation, each with 1.32%. That’s interesting to me mainly because it’s tracked so specifically, something that’s a relatively recent phenomenon.

Okay, one last one: This blog is ranked 124th among 280 New Zealand blogs with publicly available site statistics and written by New Zealanders who choose to participate in the ranking. This is the second month this blog has been included in the rankings, and it moved up four spots from 128th in the February ranking. Thank you to everyone who helped that happen, however you got here!