On Thursday The Bristol Blogger got their 100,000th hit. This has taken 33 weeks and means that The Blogger is averaging over 3,000 hits per week since it started in March.
However the blog is currently getting between 5-6,000 hits per week which puts it within range of Venue’s reputed circulation of around 7,000 copies per week. Not bad for an amateur working in their lunch hour.
The next target must be the Evening Cancer. Their thisisbristol site currently gets around 232,000 hits a month, which means The Blogger’s readership is about a tenth of theirs at present. Although at the current rate of growth we should overtake them in around six years!
This is all being done, of course, on a tiny fraction of the budgets available to the city’s traditional media outlets. If I were one the boss dinosaurs in the dead tree press I’d be taking a lot of notice of this and be getting quite worried indeed.
You know talking about ‘hits’ as opposed to ‘unique visitors’ is the classic local government way of making your site look far more popular than it is. Could you give us the unique figures for the same time frames please?
I’ve noticed that page views go up and down a lot more than visitors. Obviously page views = visitors x average page views per visitor, but why should the variation multiply rather than average out?
Unfortunately the WordPress stats don’t provide unique visitor figures. If anyone knows an easy way to find them out, let me know.
The like-with-like figures than can be most obviously compared are The Cancer’s 232,000 visits per month to The Blogger’s 23-24,00 per month.
(About 10%, which is still pretty good going in 9 months)
If you can edit your site’s source code you can use Stat Counter.
http://statcounter.com/
http://www.sitemeter.com/
Just sign up, post the code into a widget box in your sidebar (Dashboard > Presentation > Widgets) and you’re away 8)
You can set privacy options on it too – so either other people can see your full stats or not.
Useful for checking suspect IPs too 😉
I think you’re going to have a fairly consistent regular readership (who either use a feed aggregator which automatically updates their blog subscriptions, or regularly check their bookmarks), but your page views can dramatically jump about if you’ve blogged on something that suddenly becomes a newsworthy issue and turns up in the search engines
Set up Site Meter. Where’s the stats for unique visits?
The General>Summary page gives you visits & page views, and the ‘Recent Visitors’ gives a breakdown of each visit, including location, partial IP, ISP, number of pages viewed and entry & exit pages
So is a ‘visit’ the same as a ‘unique visitor’?
bristleKRS
Thanks for that, but I would have thought that a sudden run on the search engines would have had just as big an impact on visitors as on page views.
Maybe it’s because new visitors are more likely to click on tags for topics or old posts which regular readers have already read.
I must remember to blog on a newsworthy issue sometime, rather than constantly banging on about the obscure.
BB:
One of the things I like best about those stats sites is that they will give you maps showing where in the world your visitors are coming from. Obviously for you it’s mainly going to be local because that’s your subject matter, but it’s always nice when someone drops in from the Philippines or somewhere.
Rather than nickpicking, all I want to say is congratulations!
I have lots of blogs and I know it’s not easy maintaining them to get people interested on a regular basis, so nice one Briz Blogger, whoever the hell you are!
Don’t let it go to your head though.
Great stuff BB. Agreed HITS can be a little misleading compared to unique visitors……..
However, what I do know is that apart from Indie media, you do provide a great insight to the goings on in Bristol and you are the only main stream blog that covers general news. Leaving Northcliffe somewhat behind as they don’t run any editors opinion blogs for example….
Well done!
M@
I hate to burst anybodies bubbles but ………… well i have been working on my own lil blog / page today, and every time I hit the refresh button, I get another ‘count’ ………….. dunno what it means, but one way to test is to hit your own refresh button ………….. say 100 times and see what difference it makes.
Mine is not even online yet, and I have already got 350 hits ………………. great for the ego tho!
Shit, anarchists are not supposed top have egos right?
Just tried that on mine, hit refresh 10 times, and no impact on stats. Your blog software must not know which IP posts are entered from or something.
The fact that we are even on here discussing this must mean that this site is getting legimate hits.
In these comments are we witnessing the famous British tendancy of building people up and then tearing them down? (even if the tearing is only gentle)
Briz Blogger, I suggest you move to Switerland like Lewis Hamilton. I’m sure the education system is much better out there so you could post back examples for Bristol to learn from. Or maybe move to L.A. like the other celebs.
Bristol Blogger: The Movie!
Fred feel free to post your blog’s URL up here when it starts and I’ll add it to the blogroll.
Думаю, грамотная новость