A Way to Look At Blog Traffic?(Note: This will probably be of little interest to non-bloggers).
As a Sitemeter Junkie, I spend an absurd amount of time looking at my visitor stats--who sent them, where they are, how many visited in the last hour, day, week, month. But it's sometimes hard to figure out how much progress has been made because of extraordinary events. For example, here's a look at my monthly traffic count for the last year:
As you can see, there are three rather large spikes in traffic. In November, I plugged Brainster's ruthlessly at Kerry Haters, and was able to siphon off some of the traffic that we'd had over there. But like about every political blogger on the planet I lost significant traffic in December. The February spike was caused by my one and only
Instalanche as I noticed the witchhunt developing on the Left for Jeff Gannon. And last month I had terrific traffic thanks to
Michelle Malkin linking me five or six times on the Air Enron story.
You can see a generally rising trend there, but how much of that is due to getting occasional big links, and how much is permanent? It's obviously somewhere between the peaks and valleys, but where?
Then it hit me. Why not look at my worst traffic days for each month? Presumably these are the die-hards, the folks who come over when I don't get a post link from Mrs M, or
Lorie Byrd or
Kitty or
Ankle-Biting Pundits or
Conservative Grapevine ("It's like morning coffee").
Here are the lowest traffic days each month since November, when I started blogging significantly over here again:
Month ..Lo Traf. .Date
November...17...11/1/04
December...18...12/25/04
January....57....1/16/05
February...86....2/6/05
March......80....3/27/05
April......45....4/24/05
May........69....5/1/05
June.......71....6/18/05
July......118....7/4/05
August....196....8/7/05
Moved up quite a bit there over the summer, although again there are a few anomalies. For example, the low traffic days for December and July were for Christmas and Independence Day, respectively. Most of the other lows were set on weekends, when everybody's traffic is off. So here's a look at my monthly lows on weekdays which were not a holiday:
November....17....11/1/04
December....39....12/23/04
January.....66.....1/6/05
February...113.....2/21/05
March......100.....3/25/05
April.......85.....4/8/05
May........117.....5/3/05
June.......159.....6/17/05
July.......207.....7/22/05
August.....248.....8/8/05
Fairly regular rise there; February still sticks out, but not quite as dramatically as in the graph above.
If we run a three-month moving average, using the month before, this month, and the next month, here are the results:
December...41
January....73
February...93
March......99
April.....101
May.......120
June......161
July......205
Note: This may not be the best way to analyze all blogs. I post almost every day (I think I've missed one day this year), so somebody who takes a week off here or there may get different results. And it may not work for the bigger blogs. But I thought I'd share this bit of inside blogging for others looking for a different way to look at traffic.
