I started a business. It made me want to drink copious quantities, smoke myself into oblivion and hit my head against a brick wall. Instead I wrote a blog.
Site Launch Day: 13
User Count: 22
Going right: Getting Investment Impact Blog published by The Urban Times!
Going wrong: Sent out the link to my women facebook friends yesterday, only 3 (out of approx 300) replied.
Comment: V. bad response rate. Feel unloved.
Bounce Rate. I had to look it up. it sounds fairly friendly - bouncy if you will. But actually it means the opposite. It means how many people leave your site without exploring further - which is tricky since if I send out a link to a blog post, I only expect them to read THAT blog post.
This is my primary activity today by the way, analyzing which pages are a success and where my visitors come from...it is the first time I do it. I also find interesting the time spent on the pages (55 seconds on average on the Copy & Paste is a brilliant idea post). At this point I whip out my stopwatch (aka my iPhone, 21st century equivalent to a Swiss army knife) - to time myself reading it. Surely 55 seconds is too short to read it? Ok. All good. It takes me 45 seconds.
"But what if you have 4 visitors who left before 20 seconds and one visitor who answered a phone call midway?" said my boyfriend. "Then you would have no visitors who read your blog, but Google Analytics would show 5 positive visits. How customizable are the KPIs?"
Logic trumps me once more.
"Dunno" I said scurrying back to my laptop after this miserable news. People! Pay attention at the back there. Don't answer your phone when you are on my site, otherwise you'll screw with my stats.
The bald truth is that you will never be able to tell whether people are actually reading your pages, or whether they simply use the moment they land there for some quiet nose-picking time.
However, there are some statistics for a blog at least which are interesting. Returning visitors is one. Number of visits (especially if you tweeted the direct link to the page) is another. The page that people have visited the most is the one recounts my divorce. Most bizarrely it ranks not only the highest in terms of number of unique visits and pages views (highly correlated I assume) but also time spent on it. I press start on my stopwatch again and read it through - 55 seconds. And yet the average time spent on it is almost 3 minutes. Possible reasons:
1. Re-reading it
2. Picking nose
3. Answering phone
I tested the number of page views by retweeting it yesterday. It doubled the readership - I mentioned the word 'divorce' in the tweet. Second highest ranked is the Cheese Doodle Blog. I'll retweet that today....
My brother said. " Eat, Pray, Love. Two out of three. Just write your next blog about religion and you'll be sorted."
"Or another deadly sin." I replied. Watch this space. Have done plenty. Numerous times.