I recently started using statistics in an attempt to find out how many actual regular readers I have. I have a few courageous regular readers who actually comment here. So I am not talking about them. I am talking about the hypothetical regular readers who are here for the duration but can think of nothing to say.

And I can understand that. I go places and read too. I would like to comment but my mind is not up to it. It’s in surfing mode and you don’t use your rational mind when you surf. You use your relaxed mind. Your bag of tricks is up there and he’s awake. But he’s not working. He’s sitting in one of those chairs you can find at The Sharper Image store. It has ten different vibrators in it plus stereo speakers on each side.

So how does the young blogger who may be 94 years old but has only been blogging for six months deal with this situation without becoming discouraged? Well he or she could hire readers. I do that and presently I am worried because they want to form a union. Clearly they need to use their relaxed minds more and stay away from their rational minds. Or my blogging sisters and brothers could go to Google Analytics and start tracking their visitors and their longterm intentions. In a statistical example from my photoblog PhotoLinkLove.com we will see shortly how this may be working.

I spend very little time on this blog and mainly just post a few of my best photos here every day. And in response maybe ten or fifteen readers come by to look at them. At least that is what I thought was happening. But Google presents a slightly different picture.

And I am not disturbed by this situation or the apparent lack of growth. I don’t have much invested here and am just happy that a few folks are enjoying these photos.

But I am a curious person and so would like to know what is happening here. Is any growth happening? It has only been around for about ten weeks. Can Google tell me something about it? I had a garden as a young boy and would come out every day to see if something had happened. It was like watching grass grow only a little more interesting.

And that is what we will discuss next time since we are just about out of time boys and girls. Didn’t you used to hate it when the guy or girl on the tube used to say that! Captain Kangaroo used to say that and look what happened to him!

Until next time Buckaroos!

And blogging is a long distance race isn’t it? Just about every day for months or years you are going to get up and go to the keyboard. Look at your stuff. Be happy. Be sad. Be indifferent. So many emotions come into play when the blog runner puts on his or her shoes and hits this pixel packed purgatory in full stride. But the WWW will never become the PPP! Believe me I tried it yesterday and all I got was a blog dedicated to a polar bear in a snowstorm.

But that’s not what we want to discuss today. Here are the charts that will help us (I hope) discover how many folks are with us for the long haul. And is their number growing?

Do you like the graduated tint? I have been playing with Google’s photo editor for so long I can’t stop. Be happy there are not little snowmen sliding down the graph on their sleds.

The first graph gives you a summary of what happened in the month of December. And it shows a constant flow of about fifteen visitors except on the day when it wasn’t working. That would have been the day I added a premium template and forgot to do some other things.

I used to assume that these visitors represented maybe 3 or so regulars and 7 or so one time visitors. Notice that the unique visitor count is about two thirds the number of visits. Whenever I look at visits I calculate a number that is one third less in order to try and calculate the actual number of readers. Did anyone say this is an exact science? And here is the second graph.

Here we see how things may really be happening. During this month we see some of these readers moving down the path to become longterm readers. How many? Well there were about 125 visits so I calculate one third less or about 82 actual people came back ten times or more during December. Does that make sense?

I had been assuming that the 3 regulars every day were the same regulars. But what if some of the regular readers were only coming by once or twice per week? Then there would be more of them in total.

That’s a lot different than 3 regular readers and 7 one time visitors. And the graph indicates that a few more are migrating down this pathway all the time. Does that mean that every 10 weeks there will be 85 more longterm readers? In 10 weeks I have not gathered enough statistics to tell but we can revisit this situation in another month. Grab a RSS handle and find out!

In a year could there be 85 times 5 (52 weeks divided by 10 weeks equals approx. 5) readers? Maybe not. Some will fade away. But I spend ten minutes per day on this blog and the idea that it may attract even one hundred regular visitors is surprising. The idea that it could have a thousand regular readers in just two years is simply astounding!

So young blogging grasshopper remember to look deeper into your statistics and see what may be happening there. Someone once said it takes a year or two to build a productive blog. It is clear from this example that it may be so. And imagine what could happen if you spend more than ten minutes per day on your blog! Isn’t that exciting!

I use Google analytics to track my blog stats. But since I've been more involved with Performancing and I like the community here, I decided to check out Performancing Metrics (PMetrics). I installed it on one of my blogs. I've been playing around with it for the last couple of days. It's a good stats program especially if you want to see the activities of your visitors more closely.

Candy Addict shared a post about using PMetrics to find out email information. Here are 10 other cool things you can do with this interesting application.

Read the rest of this entry

Performancing Metrics (aka pMetrics) Gives you an amazing amount of detail about the visitors to your site. In some cases, it's the same data you get from other packages, but it's easier to get to and understand in pMetrics. In other cases, it's the kind of data you don't get elsewhere (easily).

Here's an example of a piece of some interesting information I gleaned from pMetrics. I run a candy blog and many times when we review a product, I have a contact with the company already and I email them when we write about one of their products (you do this every time you mention or review a product on your site don't you?). Recently, we reviewed a product and I had no contact with the company so I went to their site (let's call it abc-company-xyz.com) and found a generic contact form (no actual email address), so I filled it out letting them know we had reviewed their product.

The next day, I'm looking at pMetric's Top Referers for the day and I see a link from mail.abc-company-xyz.com and when I click on the pMetrics link, it shows me the full link is
http://mail.abc-company-xyz.com/exchange/sue.smith/Inbox/Candy+Addict+review+of+our+product.EML?Cmd=open - what do I get from this? My email got routed to someone named Sue Smith (name changed) and she can more than likely be contacted at sue.smith@abc-company-xyz.com - I now have an email address for someone inside the company and I can email her directly now.

Another example of email-related info I get from pMetrics: I can see what links to my site that people are emailing. How? On the Top Referers page in pMetrics I see various links from webmail sites like by102w.bay102.mail.live.com, us.f820.mail.yahoo.com, webmail1.webmail.aol.com, etc. Click on the link and you will see the visitor's info then click on the actions link and the first action (their arrival on your site) is the link that was sent in an email to them.

To see even more, change the url in the browser on the page that says "Visitors from us.f820.mail.yahoo.com" and remove the beginning subdomains (us.f820 in this case) so the URL just has mail.yahoo.com in it and you will see all emailed links that were clicked from Yahoo mail.

You should realize that this doesn't show you every link to your site that was emailed - only the ones that were actually clicked in a webmail application.

One of the most important and accepted blog counter services in Germany is closing. Blogscout.de was a very valuable public blogosphere-meter to find out what is going on and what is hot at the moment. On September 30th 2007 the servers will be disconnected and all collected data will be deleted on September 15th. The service and the database will not be sold. Every blog owner using blogscout.de must delete the code until then to avoid page performance delays.

Interesting is the fact that blogscout.de is NOT closing down because of counter issues but because of missing the personal goals of the founder Dirk Olbertz. He wanted to give the German blogosphere a non-commercial quality signpost (Wegweiser) to see where the subjects are heading at the moment. The quantity statistics, counting page impressions and all the other numbers, was a nice side effect but never the personal goal of Dirk. He says that he totally missed the Long Tail, all the small underrepresented blogs, and instead blogscout.de, because of its public nature, became a kind of marketing hit list.

Blog announcement: Blogscout.de wird geschlossen