Site Meter

I must be the last blogger on earth to know about site meter and to install it. I learned about it from Emily's blog. So just just in case there is someone else out there unfamiliar with it, I want to pass along the favour.

Site meter tracks visitors to your blog or website. WordPress has built-in stats, which are easily read and fun to see, but what I love about site meter is that it tracks visitors as well as pages, and most fun of all, their locations and how long they've spent at your website.

Warning: do not install this if you're the sort of person who gets elated and then depressed by fluctuations in site stats. However, if you are (and most of us get on that bandwagon at least sometimes), maybe I can help a bit there.

In my younger days, before I could write novels for a precarious living, I was, as some of you know (cough) an accountant. (That is a long story which I'll someday blog about.) Because I did a lot of work with non-profits, I learned to analyze numbers and not take them at face value. I wanted to know, for example, how sending out a hundred thousand letters (later phone calls) translated into actual donors.

Because I have a website and I'm an author, I have a similar interest in blog stats. In other words, how many people who come to my blog follow through to my website or my books. I've been watching this now for several years and it's astonishing.

The number of people who click through to my website does not co-relate to the number of people visiting my blog. There are times that the stats go way up. There are times the stats fall flat. No impact. About the same number click through every day.

Common sense would advise otherwise, but in this case it's wrong. So my friends–enjoy the strange wonders of blog stats, and don't get caught up in them. I will try to take my own advice because site meter is so much fun.

I was thrilled that someone in Okanawa, Japan spent ten minutes on my blog. Today a visitor in Rumania looked at 3 pages. This is the best of the internet, this connection. Site meter is a way to see the light spreading out from your work so freely given.

Love to all.

Filed under: Fun Tagged: blog statistics