How many people actually visit my blog on a regular basis?

October 23, 2007 1:26 PM

Google Analytics Question: Over a five month period, it's telling me I've had about 300 visitors who have read my site between 9 and 100 times. I realize this is small potatoes in the World O' Blogs, but it seems entirely too high to me. Please explain how Google thinks 20 semi-loyal visitors (my estimate) is 300. Surely they are mostly bots?
posted by eurasian to Technology (7 answers total)

Best answer: Sounds like search engine crawlers to me.
posted by holgate at 1:29 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

How are they distributed? I'd expect that almost all of those 300 are around the 9 visits in 5 months end of the scale. That's not at all unusual.
posted by winston at 2:18 PM on October 23, 2007

It's been my experience that Google Analytics does a pretty good job of filtering the bots out of your stats. It could be RSS readers hitting your site, but I thought it accounted for that too.

What are the traffic sources? Maybe you get a lot of one-off search hits?
posted by COD at 3:09 PM on October 23, 2007

Best answer: RSS readers should be hitting the xml files, not the main page of the blog, so they won't be an issue.

My guess is that many of these people are on DSL or Cable modems that issue different IPs every time the modem restarts (or every so often, when the connection is released and renewed). This means that a daily reader may have the same IP for a week, then have a new one the next week, etc. Since google has no way to know that these IPs are the same person, they appear to be multiple semi-regular readers.

Welcome to the wonderful and messy world of web traffic analysis. Now you begin to see why you should never trust website usage statistics.
posted by chrisamiller at 3:20 PM on October 23, 2007

chrisamiller: yes they do. They use cookies.
posted by rbs at 5:00 PM on October 23, 2007

Best answer: As a less extreme of what chrisamiller says, if your audience is tech-savvy they may be visiting from multiple browsers. I'll check the same site using my desktop, work desktop, laptop, and phone, and that makes me show up as 4 unique visitors, even with cookies.
posted by JZig at 5:08 PM on October 23, 2007

Response by poster: COD: If they were one off search hits, they wouldn't hit my blog more than once, no? I can only guess it's some weird mix of chrisamiller, holgate, and JZigs answer.

Thanks everyone :)

(I don't suppose there is a general formula for figuring out how many ACTUAL people read your site, is there? Like, say, 10% of unique hits are actual people?)
posted by eurasian at 8:29 AM on October 24, 2007