CT Biz Blogs

A lot of bloggers are concerned about stats. When I first looked at my stats, I was amazed at how much information it looked like there was about the numbers of people who accessed this blog and clicked around. (Well, first I was depressed at the low numbers, but then I was amazed at the amount of items that supposedly can be tracked.)

But note that I said “access” and not “read,” because that’s another thing entirely. As blogging sage Dave Winer has noted,

It would be interesting to do a study to see if people can tell you what a blog post said some short interval after reading it. Something like the SAT, for blog readers. I bet the numbers would be astonishingly small.

I think that’s especially true of the hard-core blog readers, those who scan over 100 blogs a day — and that’s a large number of people, in the blogosphere. (Mea culpa!)

As Dave points out, stat numbers don’t equal readers. But it’s also true that stat numbers don’t even equal the real number of people looking at your site. The problem with stats is that you have to do some thinking to really understand them. The numbers, by themselves, don’t mean much.

For example, one thing that bloggers forget is that not everyone who clicks on your site is actually a person, let alone actually reading your blog. Spammers are constantly hammering at the doors, windows, and floorboards of your blog, trying to get in. So, if you track your stats, don’t forget to allow for the number of spam comments or attempted spam you get. Those are either automated spam programs, or real people who are hired to try to pollute your blog.
Another problem with stats is that the number of unique visitors reported does not equal the actual number of unique visitors. That would only be true if every visitor has accepted a cookie from your site. The way all stats work is by placing a cookie. These are just for stat purposes, but plenty of folks object to cookies, and won’t accept them. Me, for example. I never accept cookies from blogs I’ve never visited before.

As it says in the Google Analytics help section:

Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.

As far as I know, if a reader doesn’t accept cookies, each page viewed is counted as a unique visit.

And those are just two ways that stats can get skewed.

But that doesn’t mean that stats are useless, blogging is useless, or blogging is more trouble than it’s worth.

Of course, that depends on what you blog for, which is, in the end, what it’s worth to you.