There’s a tradition amongst some bloggers of publishing statistics – how many people visited the blog over a month, quarter or year.

My blog is a local one – most of my posts are (I would expect) only of interest to residents in my Cheadle & Gatley ward or, at most, Stockport Borough.  Looking at the geographic spread of visitors, whilst the biggest proportion are local, there’s a surprising number from across the country and even abroad.  Many of those, I’m sure, have arrived in error, but perhaps a few found what they were looking for.

I’ve done a bit of research into how many hits blog of this sort get, and have concluded that I’m probably nudging the top quarter of councillor blogs in terms of hits.

Now it gets technical.  I use the Lib Dem MyCouncillor blogging service – free for all members of ALDC.  This has two built-in statistics which don’t seem to bear much relation to the more standard ones.  In addition, I now use StatCounter, which produces very similar numbers to Google Analytics, and should be the number used in the wider world when comparing different blogs.

The visitor numbers for December 2009 were about 5% up on November:

MyCouncillor Hits: 26596

MyCouncillor Hits Mk II: 5243

StatCounter unique  visitors: 1994*

StatCounter page loads:  3061

 * This is roughly the number of different people who visited the site.  In reality, it’s the number of different IP addresses, so ten people from the same office may appear as one IP address and one person could look like several if they access the blog from different computers.  It also doesn’t include anyone access the blog via feedreaders or similar.

   4 Comments