The analyst in me couldn’t help but do what I predicted in a prior post; which is to analyze my blog’s statistics.
I started using the in-built analytic reports from WordPress. (DISCLAIMER: none of the analytic tools I’ll be talking about disclose the identity of the you the visitor. So, I don’t know who you are. Please keep visiting!)
From WordPress I got the answers to basic questions like “how many people visited my blog today?” But I wanted to know more about visitor demographics. Within a few minutes of searching, I happened upon a couple packages called GetClicky and SiteMeter. Voila! They were now collecting information.
So after two weeks of using these tools, what do they say about you collectively?
You’re a diverse bunch.
You come from 12 countries and over 140 cities. In just 2 weeks! Like Kenya, Sweden, Jamaica, Vietnam, Australia, Israel and India.
I don’t know people from many of the cities (or countries!) in question, so it’s clear that my original mission of blogging for work friends & family also attracts a much broader readership.
A lot of you work from home, or at least visit me from home.
Over 50% of visits are from Internet Service Providers. If you worked for a company of any size and visited me from work, usually your company’s domain name would appear instead.
What does this mean? Maybe the work-from-home phenomenon is more pervasive than ever. Or that you do a lot of surfing during leisure time at home. Bad news for television networks as I wrote earlier.
A lot of you read multiple blog entries at once.
I suppose if you’re a first-time visitor, and you like what I write about, you’d be inclined to read on. And you do. Sometimes for 5, 10 even 20 minutes. Though I worry about the essay-length of my posts and whether they should be shorter.
My biggest fan?
My biggest fan is….a nursing home resident in the Midwest of the United States? I don’t know anyone in such a setting. Could be an employee there. Or a resident. Which leads me to wonder: who is this person? How did they find my site? Why do they keep coming back? Are they somebody of Czech descent that fled the Communists? Or that has a daughter living in Prague? Or has lost their faculties and somehow finds me interesting? I’ll probably never know.
In the meantime, to quote the famous cartoon, “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog“.
Don MacLennan | High Tech Yankee 
Don this seems an interesting line of thought. My two bits to get a clearer picture from the data you are analyzing.
1) You can segment you user profile further by the source site to a particular blog entry- if the user directly came to your site (regular visitor), directly to an old entry (referral visitor)
2) And then take it one step further to associate visitors in a given period (Apr-May-Jun) to a particular event- your reference on another popular blog, you in news for AVG, a job posting made by you etc.
3) Of all the visitor entries with IP address directing you to a particular organization and area, you can check LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook etc to see how are you connected with each personnel in the organization – 1/2/3 level connections to get a finer filter on your visitor profile.
4) Finally for your work from home analysis you can take one step to cross the analysis of the time when a visitor came to your site and the official business hours for the country of the visitor. That will give you a better number on % of people working from home. 50% seems a big number to believe!
Cheers!
No wonder your blog is so popular, when you advertise on Facebook. 🙂
At least that’s how I got here.
Which makes me curious. Why would someone advertise personal weblog?
Hi Ondra,
Because my job is to understand how consumers use the Internet (including social media)and how my company might serve them, I do a lot of things to experiment with such things. Including blogging, social media advertising, etc.
A secondary benefit is that it helps me attract talented people to engage in a dialogue about career opportunities at my company.