{"id":2850,"date":"2012-12-18T15:38:16","date_gmt":"2012-12-18T21:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/?p=2850"},"modified":"2012-12-18T15:38:16","modified_gmt":"2012-12-18T21:38:16","slug":"lies-damned-lies-and-wordpress-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/?p=2850","title":{"rendered":"Lies, damned lies, and WordPress statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two or three months ago, @dangergirl101 tweeted that the website she operates with her husband<\/a> had just reached one million views. She’s an old friend, so I sent her a reply to say “Guess I lost the popularity contest we weren’t actually having… Congrats on hitting 1M!” She thanked me, said she always reads my blog, then assured me that I’d hit one million in no time.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t help but smile when I read that. Why? Because WordPress Site Stats started monitoring views back in February, 2011 and I finally reached 15,000 views in November, 2012. At that pace, it’ll be many, many years before I can even start sniffing the nether regions of a million.<\/p>\n

A few days ago, I decided to look for some new plugins to add to the blog. That’s how I found the “Share this” buttons that are at the bottom of each entry, so maybe I’d find something else interesting. I eventually stumbled upon NewStatPress, which keeps track of a lot more than the number of views and top posts and pages.<\/p>\n

It shows the most recent hits, search terms, referrals, page views, etc. Basically, it gives me a lot more information. Most of it isn’t necessary. I mean, I don’t really<\/i> need to know that the last referrer to the site was www.myreliabledating.com. It’s interesting and amusing, but not necessary.<\/p>\n

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of Sunday and Monday. I’ll admit that I’ve never thought this blog was really popular. For the most part, I write it because I enjoy it. That said, I’m not the only<\/i> person who reads it—my parents occasionally ask me questions—which is why I was disappointed when I looked at the WordPress Stats page and saw zero views on Sunday and two on Monday. Two visitors in two days. *sigh*<\/p>\n

Then I clicked on the NewStatPress overview page, thinking that a referrer with a name like pervertedcookie.au.pn would lift my spirits. What I saw first was that the number of visitors on Sunday was 39 and Monday was 41. Eighty visitors instead of two. Let’s see here… 80\/2 = 40 x 15,000 WordPress views = 600,000<\/b> NewStatPress views. Huh… so that’s what the nether regions of one million smells like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two or three months ago, @dangergirl101 tweeted that the website she operates with her husband had just reached one million views. She’s an old friend, so I sent her a reply to say “Guess I lost the popularity contest we weren’t actually having… Congrats on hitting 1M!” She thanked me, said she always reads my … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Lies, damned lies, and WordPress statistics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[649],"class_list":["post-2850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-notes","tag-visitor-statistics"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1muBs-JY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2850"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2858,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions\/2858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnbakken.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}