An Incomplete Picture

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

One of the more frustrating things about running a blog (at least, if you use Google's Blogger service) is getting a reliable count of how many people are actually visiting your site, and which pages they are viewing.  Blogger's own inbuilt statistics are deeply flawed, because

• They don't show a total for people who land on your "root" page -- i.e. the latest posts, which is the vast majority of visitors -- only for those who hit a particular post
• They include visits from "bots" and automatically-placed malicious links posing as visitors
• They exaggerate the numbers of visits to each named post by a factor of at least 2

The result is (a) an unhelpful inflation of the visitor numbers, and (b) unrealistic totals for some posts which are actually rarely visited by real people but which have somehow got themselves attached to malicious links and bots.

If you install Google Analytics, the statistical picture is a lot more accurate, if also quite humbling -- far fewer real people visit your site daily than Blogger would have you believe.  Weirdly, though, if I look at my all-time Top Ten most visted posts, the totals are greater in Google Analytics than in Blogger, which would indicate that Blogger's inbuilt stats are even wonkier than they seem.  Here's a comparison:

According to Google Analytics:
Way out in front is "/" i.e. visitors landing on the current page of posts, and not any particular post, at a cool 91,497.  Setting that aside, the Analytics Top Ten for those landing on a single named post (usually via a keyword search or a link) looks like this:

  1. Slip Sliding Away                   2,176
  2. Whatever happened to Donkey Jackets 1,487
  3. A Miracle of Deliverance            1,447
  4. Tears In the Stop Bath              1,427
  5. Remembrance Sunday                    838
  6. White Crows, Black Swans...           742
  7. Songs are Like Tattoos                511
  8. The Next Village                      490
  9. Flying Ant Day (2011)                 483
 10. BSA M20 Motorbikes                    405

According to Blogger:
There are no figures for "/" in Blogger.  The Blogger Top Ten looks like this:

  1. Whatever Happened to Donkey Jackets 1,681
  2. A Miracle of Deliverance              989
  3. Slip Sliding Away                     781
  4. Remembrance Sunday                    757
  5. Old Stuff                             683
  6. Pigeon Post                           627
  7. Peter Goldfield                       587 (#18 on GA)
  8. Flying Ant Day (2011)                 559
  9. Red Trousers                          466 (#16 on GA)
 10. Walking the Dead                      357 (#14 on GA)

Unfortunately, only the Top Ten are shown in Blogger, so I cannot say where a post highly-placed in Google Analytics but missing from Blogger's Top Ten, e.g. "Tears in the Stop Bath", is ranked in Blogger.

So, there's a broad overlap, with generally higher counts in Analytics, but some intriguing anomalies, most of which are certainly due to robotic non-visits inflating the counts in Blogger -- "Pigeon Post" and "Old Stuff", for example, neither of which even makes the top 50 in Google Analytics.

But the main (and, I suppose, obvious) lessons are, first, that the biggest numbers for individual posts happen where the subject matter is of quite specific interest to certain constituencies of search-engine users, and, second, that many of my posts will not have satisfied the seeker.  Donkey jackets, for example, are clearly an item of current interest, but my wistful post about my nostalgia for old coats must have been of zero interest to most of the 1,500 people who stumbled over it, presumably trying to find where to buy one.  By contrast, my father's reminiscence of his experiences at Dunkirk is of great interest to military historians specialising in "vox pop" accounts of WW2, and has led to some interesting correspondence.

However, still at Number One by some margin in the most reliable statistical source is the post from 2009 "Slip Sliding Away", which happens to contain some mild incidental accounts of canings in my primary and secondary schools in Stevenage, and is linked to by a site specialising in the history of corporal punishment, in all its painful manifestations.  Oh, well...

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford