Understanding Your Stats

Here’s my tip on understanding your stats – there’s no understanding them.  You can carefully craft a post as per my previous tips, edit and hone, categorise and tag the hell out of it and hit the publish button, only to find the next day that two people and a dog have looked at it.  On the other hand, you can whack a few words in the box, stick a few random tags on and garner a sky-high block in your stats.  There’s just no accounting for it.  This doesn’t mean there’s no point in writing good posts; it just means that the number of views doesn’t always correspond on the day to the quality of writing – and there’s no accounting for why.

I guess I could get an expert in blog stats to come take a look.  They could break it down by region, hour of the day, aspect of the moon, star sign and time of the month and come up with some sort of whizzy and ultimately meaningless algorithm.  But I suspect all that would achieve would be to empty a lot of digits from my bank account whilst leaving me not much wiser as to why.  Why does this happen?  For example, I got a gratifying surge in views last week with my top tips on blogging, then for the last three days they plummeted to a low not seen since the first days of lizardyoga’s weblog, back in 2008.  You could argue that of course I get more views when I’ve actually written something but it don’t always pan out that way; usually there’s at least a day or two where views carry over as people the other side of the world catch up with the day.

That’s the sum total of all I’ve learnt about stats – there’s no accounting for ’em.

Kirk out