Quite often people will start talking to me about my blog and ask if I have any idea about the analytics that my site garners. The answer is yes. Thanks to my friend Chris Lynn who installed it within the backend of Don’t Blink, I have a program called Jetpack that gives me a day by day account of the number of browsers that access my site. This information is invaluable to me as I like to have a good idea of how many people visit my blog and what topics the majority of my readers prefer over others.

Besides the volume of traffic statistics that I receive, I also get other really interesting pieces of information delivered to me regarding my blog. I am told what key words people type in to search engines to find Don’t Blink, what outside sites are referring people to my blog, what links people are clicking on once they are reading my posts, and a breakdown of what individual posts are getting accessed. I assess this information about two to three times every week to have a better understanding of my readers.

When it comes to my daily volume of readers there are a couple trends. I usually always get a large audience on Sunday nights, especially if I post something (which I always try to do). Also, the more consecutive days I post, the more traffic I will get on the latter days in that string. For example, if I published a new blog post Monday through Thursday my web traffic would increase each day, with an exceptionally high impression number on Thursday night. Readers reward you for consistency. However, there are random days when my traffic will shoot right through the roof even though I had not posted anything in a couple days. For example, last week when I was too busy with work to even think about writing a sentence for Don’t Blink I checked my analytics and saw that 900 people (browsers) had visited my site on Wednesday. After looking at the full report I saw that roughly 700 of those hits came by referral of a Japanese website. I had written a blog post 10 months back about Barry Anderson, the mascot of the Chicago Bulls. For whatever reason, Japan LOVES mascots. Barry visited Japan a couple years back and to this day he still has rock star status in the country. On this site there was some thread about Barry and someone found my blog post link and shared it on there. The floodgates opened.

I love looking at the key words people use to find Don’t Blink. Of course I get lots of searches dealing with “Brent Reser,” “Brent Reser Don’t Blink,” “Brent Reser Bio,” and “Don’t Blink Blog,” but many of the other searches are much more random. Just for today, here are some of the key words people typed in to find my site: “random ugly guy,” “Rascal Flatts time on stage,” “double pan fried noodles at PF Changs,” “cheer camp arrival,” “red robin mascot head, ”Boston Bruins stadium,” “iron horse queso recipe,” “embarrassing loss for Loyola football program,” and “don’t waste money on autographs.” Yep, I am proud to say that I have covered such a myriad of topics while authoring this blog that internet users from all over can type in seemingly random phrases and be directed to my little space on the web. Definitely a little creepy too.

I enjoy seeing which blog posts are performing well. As I mentioned in my 2 year anniversary blog post, my passage titled “Instagram Spam” is my all-time most read post. Even right now it is still the most read post pretty much each day. My newer posts are usually always right underneath “Instagram Spam” and then it is whatever post got shared on some random website rounding out the top five most read posts for that particular day.

Speaking of random websites, I pay close attention to which sites are contributing to my site’s traffic. Of course Google, Facebook, and Twitter are my big top three referrers but I am more interested in the websites that will pop up for a couple days and give me rushes of traffic. Because I wrote a couple posts related to Montana Athletics this week, I have had a lot of people from the popular blogging site eGriz take a gander at what I got going. Many times when I review a restaurant or a product the company will get wind of it and share it from their website or social media sites, thus sending people to Don’t Blink. Sometimes, just like with the Japanese website example, a link to my site will get shared on a random platform and I hit viewership gold.

Part of the fun of authoring a blog for me is definitely scrutinizing these statistics and identifying trends. It is cool to see that my writing has an impact on many people from all over the world. Seeing this evidence on a daily basis motivates me to continue to write and to do my best to put out quality work. Don’t Blink.