The Best Blog Metric?
Since posting up my blog statistics for 2007 I’ve been wondering if there’s a better way to measure the growth of a blog rather than going off pure visitors alone. I see blogs as a very different animal compared to your average website, often peaking and diving rapidly as you publish stories that are more popular or controversial than others. You only have to read about surviving the dig effect to see what I mean.
So what’s the best blog metric to use?
Well for me I’ve decided to put unique visitors and page impressions to one side and focus on subscribers to my RSS feed. Why? Well in my opinion 1 subscriber is worth way more than 1000’s of irrelevant uniques. If this blog were an e-commerce site 1 subscriber would be the equivalent to a sale. It’s a definable action, somebody has enjoyed an article I have written and actually made a the effort to sign up and subscribe to my feed. That to me says a great deal more that “you have had X uniques over Y days”.
This blog uses probably the most popular feed syndication tool out there, FeedBurner.com. (Acquired by Google last year) So what stats can I glean from their interface? Well unless I’m missing something very obvious not a great deal as the predefined date ranges are pretty restrictive. A report of the “last 30 days” seems a bit to short and “all time” too large. I did however manage to pull out the following, which are screen grabs of the last 30 days and the all time subscribers. It’s shows some solid growth which is great to see.
Last 30 Days
All Time Growth
An alternative feed burner tool, which I found a bit better to use was another developed by Joost de Valk (that man must have way too much time on his hands). This at least allows you to plot growth over the past 6 months, 1, 2 and 3 years which are much better time frames to measure against don’t you think?
Last 6 Months
All Time Growth
This time next year hopefully I’ll be able to revisit this post and report on even better results.
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[...] statistics are the best. An interesting article by Paul Wright at Fish and Clicks titled ‘The Best Blog Metric” was rather thought [...]