Curious About the Mountain of Traffic

Sometimes, I look at my blog statistics that are built into Wordpress.

Today, for the last 20 days, I see this Wordpress reporting of HITs:

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Naturally, I am curious about that mountain of traffic this past few days but since the WP data is so flakey, I jump to Google analytics for that blog and look at the last 30 days:

hmmm, no sign of any traffic event in the last few days.​

Looking back at the WP data, I notice that while visits had the mountain, the visitors did not. So there was maybe one person who returned to the blog over and over and read the entire blog a few times creating lots of visits but not lots of visitors.

Except, GA shows no corresponding increase in either page views or sessions that supports this idea.

So:

- I go back to WP stats are flakey, they are counting some sort of bot activity that GA does not

- WP stats are flakey, what the heck is a "hit" anyway and why when I look closely, are they reporting last 20 days?

Many More Readers!

I just took a peek at the statistics relating to the views and readers of this blog.

Last week, I noticed that we had 99,854  page views.

Today, it's 100,126 page views!

That's a lot of new page views over this weekend. I'm thrilled and humbled.

Given all those readers,  I'll dig down and find some more interesting insights to share with you.

But right now, I'm watching the Oscars.

And looking at one of my other blogs that has no readers, I think I'll do a call out to my blog on homeschooling education, scope and sequence.  

Blog Readership Statistics

Would it be wrong for me to share the popularity of the social media forum blog's progress with my readers? Here in fact are my stats from Blogger.

I think the blog readership data is interesting since I'm closing in on 100,000 page views! Is there a blog club of people that I get to join when I cross a 100,000!!!!

Pageviews today

72

Pageviews yesterday

92

Pageviews last month

3,108

Pageviews all time history

99,854

Statistics and Online Marketing

This being my personal blog to ponder the mysteries of online marketing, I'll take it in a different direction. I am testing the market so if you have a reaction, would you please leave a comment? I wrote this email today which reminded me of a set of articles, book, or even online course that I'd like to create. It would be about online marketing and statistics. Here's the excerpt from the email...It was in response to one of my colleagues commenting that she's giving up on predicting what will work in terms of online marketing efforts.

Here's my experience,

I generally feel that for every three or four things that we try, one works.

Then we take the thing that works and try to improve on it or at least do a lot more of it.

And we study the ones that didn't and see what we can learn from them

Then of course, usually whatever worked the first time stops working.  

The things that didn't work get tried again and work the second time.

Is it random?  Maybe,

My personal theory if that the logic is in the numbers.  We are usually working with small numbers so that the statistics are misleading. It's only when we have tens of thousands of examples that patterns become clearer but we're often trying to interpret results based on dozens or hundreds of examples. Which is too small.

BTW, if I ever get to do my own math curriculum, interpreting data and statistics will move from a peripheral  issue to a mainstream one. It horrifies me how many people can take differentials (ie do calculus), calculate sines and cotangents (geometry 2), and solve differential and quadratic equations (algebra 1 & 2) but can't answer the basic questions of, "we need a 25% response rate for this effort to be cost-effective, we've sent out a hundred random  emails. Ten people responded.  Should we keep testing or is it decided?"  (BTW, I too am not sure that I know how to answer it).

Data Conflicts: Analytics vs Adwords data

Am I the only one who cares about integrity of data? I search the web and I can't seem to find anyone else who cares about the statistical validity of data for decision making of adwords campaigns. Or about reconciling different data from adwords and analytics.

For instance, for the month of August, my google analytics report shows 50 new customers from the Google Adwords campaign. For the same time period, the Adwords internally generated report show 100 (yes, I'm not giving out my real data).

My belief is that Adwords is a cookie-based system so as long as the visitor converts into a customer on the same computer that they first clicked thru from google on, they count as an Adwords customer.

Analytics, I theorize, is session based. So if the customer first came to my site from an Adwords click but then bookmarked the site and closed his browser. Then he came back to my site by either using the bookmark or googling (natural search) my name, he would count in Analytics as either direct or natural search customer respectively.

Right?



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