On stats

I reinstated Google Analytics on the blog this week. More out of interest than for any other reason, although it does open the door to potential future advertising and collaboration opportunities at absolutely no cost and very little effort. But it’s mainly just to look at some numbers.

And I do like numbers.

The rudimentary wordpress stats package thing that was automatically active on the blog is ok, but GA does give you so much more information.

And I do like information.

Of course, the numbers and the information mean so much more when you have lots of them to compare with each other. It’s (very) early days and most things that I’ve seen on there have left me completely unsurprised.

Except for one stat, which I had never really considered.

It appears that over the past three days, over 60% of people reading 6000 miles… are doing so on mobile devices. Woah! That’s a lot more than I had thought. I mean, I hadn’t really thought about it a lot, but if I had (and obviously, I have now, retrospectively), I would have thought (and now, as mentioned above, I have thought) it would have been a much smaller percentage than that. Like 10. Or 20.

Fortunately, thanks the genius that is The Guru, this blog is optimised for viewing on whatever size or type of device you choose. Thus, it should be a seamless, fluid, intelligent experience.

It’s just the content that lets it down.

And look, the site looks good to me when I occasionally log in on my mobile device, but if you’re on your phone right now, how is it looking? Please let me know if things aren’t working ok for you (I mean on the blog, not in life generally) (there are professionals who can help you with that kind of thing) (I’m far from professional).

I’m going to review my stats once I’ve got enough data to review, and I might post about it on here if there’s anything worth posting about. In the meantime, in the same sort of vein, I apparently had quite a good day (by my standards) on Flickr yesterday (mainly thanks to this post referencing this post referencing this album, I’d imagine) with almost 7,000 views.

If I could get those sort of numbers on the blog, I could almost retire.

Almost.

There’s no business like snow business

This blog isn’t, as I have been forced to point out several times, my job. For me, it’s a hobby, it’s mostly enjoyable and it allows me to speak my mind when no-one else will listen. Quite regularly, no-one listens on here either, but that’s not the point. When people do listen, it’s also provided opportunities to meet and engage (digitally, at least) with a huge number of interesting people in many different places, with many different viewpoints. I like that.

Also, it doesn’t provide much income – there are google ads dotted around (up top and to your right) and occasionally, people get in touch wanting paid links or sponsored posts. I can choose to be very selective with these, because I know that the blog isn’t my source of income, and I’ll always tell you if I am endorsing a product in exchange for cold, hard cash of course.
It doesn’t happen very often, but if it does no harm, why would I not want to earn a bit of beer money?

Anyway, the thing is that it’s always nice to see how many people come and visit the blog and it’s always interesting to see what they read. But yesterday, things went a bit mad.

I thought that could see it coming, with Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s “will we get snow?” posts (here and here), doing brisk business, for want of a better term. But I had no idea what was going to happen this morning, when I posted a couple of screenshots from the webcam at the Upper Cableway Station just before 7.

A couple of influential retweets and Facebook shares, a mention or two on local radio, some decent SEO and suddenly:

bang.

Totes ridic. Put simply, it was the biggest day this blog has ever seen, in all of its 7½ year history. And not “only just” either. I got over 10 times the average daily traffic and more than 3 times greater than the previous best ever. And I thought that was big. Which it was.

Before yesterday.

For just a few hours, I was almost a bit 2oceansvibey. All that remains now is to see how many (if any) of those lovely people are going to come back and see me again or not – and if there’s enough money in the kitty for a beer at the end of the month. Which is today.

Your following options once again, should you have missed them before: facebook, twitter, rss