Stats and Searches

I love Blogger Stats. It tells me how many hits my blog gets-- per month, per day, even per hour. It tells me which of my individual posts get the most hits, and where my visitors come from. It gives me pretty graphs and maps for visual illustration. It's the perfect tool for a numbers nerd like me to geek out on.

I check it almost every day, just to see how the blue graph has changed.

Since July, 2010, when Blogger started keeping track-- and this wonderful feature appeared on my dashboard-- I've had 4,790 hits. It's not very much, only about 12 hits per day. By comparison, the super secret anonymous blog I retired earlier this year was getting as many as 100-150 hits a day. But lately there has been a sharp uptick in activity.

Since April of this year, hits on the Timblog have been climbing.

April: 311
May: 349
June: 410
July: 635

It sort of exploded in July, partly because I wrote more posts that month than ever before.

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The only problem with these stats is that I don't know how many people actually read the blog, and how many people just stumble upon it. One of the coolest things Blogger Stats gives me is Search Keywords people used to find my blog:

librarians in love
be my friend
college wrestler penis
boats churning in the sea
are blogs dead
wrestling haircuts
pictures of capuchin monkey with candle
zojiv [WTF?]
boys hair cut bowl

For some of these, it's easy to figure out how they lead to my blog. For others it's very puzzling. But that's a discussion for another day. The weird thing about this list is it keeps changing. I saved a bunch of these phrases about a month ago because I wanted to write about them, and half of them don't even appear in the stats anymore. And new ones keep replacing them, like:

goblins
pooper scoopers
demotivational such an occasion
raping goblins

Anyway, my point is, I'd say at least half of the hits on my blog have nothing to do with loyal readers. It's people doing Google searches for things like "be my friend" and finding my post from last year about annoying auto dealerships who want to be my friend.

By far the most popular post in the history of this blog was when I wrote about my hair. (It's in first place with 335 pageviews. Second place only has 136.) Obviously people are looking for things about haircuts and stumbling upon my hairy navel-gazing.


So I don't know if I'm actually gaining new readers, or if I'm just becoming more findable in the searchiverse. One thing I do know is that it used to be that if I googled "timblog," it didn't even appear on the first page of results. Now it's the second result. So I guess that's progress.