On the last day of 2010, I watched with baited breath as my blog stats for the year approached 5,000 visits for the year. I’d switched to WordPress in February 2010 and my blogging trailed off over the summer, but it had picked up again in the fall and I was desperately hoping for that nice round number of 5,000. It just sounded cooler to say I had 5,000 visits than it did to say I had 4,998.
I ended up with 5,004 visits for all of 2010.
Yesterday, I had a similar experience watching my blog stats tick up toward the end of the year. Again, I was hoping I’d hit a nice round number, and indeed early yesterday afternoon, I did it.
I hit 100,000 visits.
Now, understand that is since inception, so I ended up with just over 95,000 visits on the blog for 2011.That’s 19 times the visits I had in 2010. Now, that’s just direct visits to the blog. If you factor in the stats I have from Feedburner, which captures people who read the blog via RSS feed, I had another 142,500 visits, making for a grand total of nearly 250,000 visits for 2011.
For those interested, here are some additional blog stats for 2011:
According to Google Analytics I had 39,397 unique visitors to the blog in 2011. (As opposed to page views which is what the numbers above represent.) Of those unique visitors, 28% of them are return visitors, meaning that at least 11,000 of them have come back for more.
Visitors by country
- 68% of those visitors came from the United States.
- 6% came from the UK
- 4% from Canada
- 2.5% from Australia
- 2% from Germany
- 1% from Spain
- A mix from Italy, France, Netherlands and Brazil.
How visitors browsed the blog
- 29% Firefox
- 27% Chrome
- 24% Safari
- 15% Internet Explorer (my how things have changed
Visitor operating system
- 55% Windows
- 29% Macintosh
- 11% iPad
- 2% Linux
- 1.5% iPhone
- 0.5% Android
Visitors using mobile devices
- 82% iPad
- 11% iPhone
- 3% Android
- 1% iPod
- 1% Blackberry
Coda
I spent the last year virtually obsessing about blog stats. That’s going to change in 2012. Now that the blog has been reestablished as a going concern, my focus, as I’ve said, is going to be on improving the content, but I’m going to worry less about just how many people are visiting. Instead of checking my stats multiple times each day, I’m going to try to look at them maybe once a week (even less if I can manage). And I’m only going to report something here if it is particularly unusual. I don’t imagine my visits will increase 19-fold again in 2012, nor do I expect another 11,000-visit day like I had on December 6. But I’d estimate close to 150,000 visits over the course of 2012 directly on the blog, and another 200,000 or so via RSS feed. That’s 350,000 visits total. Come back this time next year and we’ll see how close I was.
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