Sunday 16 August 2020

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics!


Bookish Beck recently created a post all about her stats. I only remember to check my stats sporadically, but her post was all I needed to go there. I was curious to see what posts attracted the most views. The hard part then became working out why one particular post attracted so much love and not another?
  • My most popular post of all time is a readalong masterpost for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that I hosted back in 2017, with a whopping 16200 views. I guess it just shows how popular this series of books (and movies) continues to be?
  • Coming in second with 12300 views, is my master post for the 2015 AusReadingMonth.
  • Followed by the 2014 AusReadingMonth master post with 6380 views. Why 2015 has garnered so many more views than any other AusReadingMonth post is beyond me. 
  • Fourth place finally goes to a book review, with Tim Winton's Eyrie, a review I posted on the 11th Nov 2013. It now has 5690 views.
  • I only give you my fifth most viewed post, because it also has the dubious honour of being one of my most heavily spammed posts, Musing of an Idle Reader from 3rd Jan 2019. It was my reflections on Don Quixote featuring my struggles with the poetry of Cervantes!

I was also curious to see how my pages were faring.
  • Children's Picture Books is my most popular page with 2530 views. 
  • Followed by my Classics Club List #1 with 2110.

Some of the amusing search enquiries that have landed people on my blog include:
  • purple dragonfly
  • double consciousness and sexuality
  • vulgar tales
  • in vitro fertilisation book
  • Australian flag.

The majority of my viewers come from the US, followed by Australia, and curiously in third and fourth place are Russia and the Ukraine. Although maybe not so curious, since most of my spammers seem to write in Cyrillic. Lately I've been getting some soft porn spam, which is an interesting new development to say the least!

4300 searches also come from that strange, exotic place called Unknown Region!

Most people land on my blog thanks to a google search. But I was pleased to see that pinterest was also high on the list, as I now always add a copy of my review link (with the image of the book) on my pinterest board.
  • This will be my 1537th post.
  • I have 8697 published comments.
  • My all-time number of views is 759615.
  • My top posts this month are my latest Stories & Shout Outs 
    • a 2018 post about Jane Austen on the screen (kind of understandable given that August has also traditionally been Austen in August.)
    • my recent Humankind review 
    • and the latest Classics Club Spin.
  • Curiously my most visited page this month is the one with all the Nobel Laureates for Literature. People are obviously getting excited about the October announcement date!
I have now reached new heights (or an incredible low!) in review-avoidance strategies. Instead of devoting an hour or so to finish off one of the five drafts lingering behind the scenes, I have spent my time mulling over stats and revisiting old posts.

How have you spent your Sunday evening?

6 comments:

  1. Oh I've just realised I missed by blogiversary - I knew that was going to happen! Interesting stats and searches!

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    Replies
    1. Welcome to the club of forgetting your blogoversary! Happy belated wishes anyway :-)
      I'm certainly curious to know which post landed the 'vulgar tales' search!

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  2. My most popular posts are never the books either, but the ones with a list of books. It's clear I should just post lists of books!

    Now going off to add 1 to the count of your review of Tim Winton's Eyrie... ;-)

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    Replies
    1. I used to do lots of list posts too Reese, but they kind of morphed into the various award pages on my sidebar. Although with all this review-avoidance going on right now, it might be time to revisit my 1001 books to read before you die posts....!

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  3. I'm just about to write a list post as it happens, but luckily I noticed you on the sidebar and so got to avoid getting started for a few more minutes. I could say I never look at my own stats, mostly because they are less than yours and Sue's and Lisa's by factors of 10 or a hundred. My most viewed post for years was a review of a Vance Palmer short story, the Rainbird, which had some sort of resonance with Indians. Bill

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  4. The search terms that people use to get to my site are a source of much mirth for me too. Wish I could see which posts have been the most popular since the blog started but I can't find that info via Wordpress.

    ReplyDelete

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