Wednesday, March 11, 2020

The Mysterious 10,896 Page Views

Mount Shasta, Northern California.
"Just a Tiny Trailer and a Bit of Snow"
I was feeling okay with the 4,000-5,000 page views per month for my tiny trailer camping blog Green Goddess Glamping. There are other camping blogs with many more readers, for sure. After being the sole writer and administrator for my blog's eighteen-month existence, though, I was happy to see the monthly page views creep up to the six and seven thousand range. Then came last month with a page views count of 10,896, and I had to ask myself, "What's that all about?"

I use the Blogger platform for my blog. I've heard others are better--"more versatile"--but I'm familiar with Blogger and have learned a few tricks that allow me to meet my blogging needs. The Blogger dashboard does have a "Stats" option as part of the Blogger service.
"Stats is an important piece of the blogging puzzle, as it allows you to track your blog's traffic and find out exactly what your audience is looking for. As such, integrated, real-time stats has been one of the most frequently requested features from our users."

Blogger Stats is telling me that last month Green Goddess Glamping received 10,896 page views. Studying the graph Stats supplies (vertical Views/horizontal days of the month), the views ranged from around 750 to 50, reflecting the day/night cycles that are usual . . . except for February 16, which recorded almost 2,000 page views. Then for the next 10-11 days, there was strong page hits. Why?

Here are the Green Goddess Glamping page views per post during that time, revealing consistent viewing of the articles. The odd detail is that I had not posted an article on February 16, when the viewer page hits spiked. Another graph provides information on Top Referrers, the major being Facebook because of my tiny trailer group activity. Google and the Tear Jerker forum were listed. I have recently joined Tear Jerkers. Continuing down the list of declining referrers, we get to the last: "Other," which lists 6.58K--and there we have the source of that great increase in page views. And yet we don't, do we? I mean, how does an identification of "Other" help me?


The next Stats lists provides URLs for referrers, but the list still lumps the large number of Other also for the URLs, providing no detail. The next chart lists browsers, with no surprises, the majority being Chrome, Safari, Mobile, Firefox, and Mobile Safari, with a long list of minor browsers.

I thought that perhaps Facebook Ads might be the source of the increase. I sometimes boost a post that I think will have wider appeal in order to increase my exposure to readers with the same interests that my blog covers. However, my last ad had finished on January 24, so there was no correlation.

In the end, it doesn't seem like I'm going to be able to get that bit of information about what I did right to create that spike in page views. Maybe it wasn't anything I did, just some random bit of attention. Maybe the "Other" views were really some attention from China, which is not listed on the views list. However, I do have a Stats map that marks where the views come from, and the overwhelming page hits were from the United States.

It's a mystery, so I'll just keep on keepin' on. I wish I could find out, though. If anyone has insights, please contact me!

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