Blog explosion?
Things got interesting on the stat counter on Blogger the last few days.
I mean, here’s what happened:
July 18 – 1043 hits.
That’s a solid day. I break 1,000 when I post something interesting, or GURPSDay, or both, typically. My record month ever was about 930 hits per day, though unevenly so.
But then
July 19 – 1471 hits
That’s really good, maybe my best ever to date. Blogger doesn’t really keep archive stats. But 350 of those were a 1-hour spike in hits that is consistent with some sort of automated software, I think. So that’s easily dismissed.
July 20 – 2565 hits
Holy. Crap. This is by far the best day I’ve ever had. The weird thing about it is that while there’s spiky behavior, there’s rather a few spike, plus that section where I hit 100-240 hits per hour for five or six hours. That’s not the usual hit pulse from a bot.
July 21 – as of 8am 1191 hits
If that keeps up I’ll do 2,200 hits today.
Analysis
Well, this is all well and good. Google Analytics tells me my traffic hasn’t changed at all. But then, Google seems to very much undercount traffic, where Blogger overcounts. So there’s that.
I do hope I’m reaching more people. Given the number of followers I now have on Google+ (over 1,000!) I think more people are seeing my site. Also, my best traffic days have always been when I post about 5e, and my Dragon Heresy SRD5.1 work is getting close to a real thing (I have 9 days left in my writing schedule and made major progress in getting one of the hardest, most sloggy sections significantly advanced) and I hope I’m getting hits from that.
We shall see – I hope it keeps up, obviously.
My blog has a notably larger percentage from Russia on the blogger stats.
Haxxors?
I get like 40 on a peak day 😀 6k views last month, though, my highest of any month. According to Blogger, anyways.
However, a solid 35% of my traffic reports as "Linux". While I'm sure there's an overlap between Linux Users and GURPS aficionados, I'm pretty sure those are overwhelmingly web spiders.
Check your sources and you may find out what spiking your traffic.
Doesn't help. If it were that obvious I'd have pointed it out. There are big mismatches between Google Analytics, Blogger Statistics, and Statcounter, and I use all three. Man of these pageviews in Blogger don't even seem to track to an article (thus I suspect bot), but some do.
How would you rate Statcounter between the three?
On the average over the time I've been doing statcounter, the two are on the average within 2% of each other. However, you can go from being 35% high to 35% low on successive weeks, and double digit swings week to week were observed.
Getting both and sanity checking is good. Blogger is probably just mucked up, and there's probably less filtering I'd guess.
On the average over the time I've been doing statcounter, the two are on the average within 2% of each other. However, you can go from being 35% high to 35% low on successive weeks, and double digit swings week to week were observed.
Getting both and sanity checking is good. Blogger is probably just mucked up, and there's probably less filtering I'd guess.
I really hate those spikes. Perhaps I should invest in a few additional hit counters myself.
Mine blew up in the past week or so, too. Another of my blogs went from almost no traffic to thousands for a week, then tapered back off to where it probably should be.
I also use Analytics, but I find it so annoying to parse out the information I want that I just drop in occasionally to see what my unique user count is looking like. Even then, it's like "analytics for analysts" rather than an easy way for me to determine what people like on my blog or where they find it – so I can support those two things.
Since I run my own server, I have raw logs. No particular explosion. The referrers to my Pyramid 92 review look fairly normal: six from here, two from Dungeon Fantastic, one (slightly oddly) from newsblur.com, most no referrer at all – which usually means either bots or paranoid people like me.
Talking of which, remember that a lot of web browsers now block Google Analytics as spyware, so you won't get the full story.