A Year Of Blog Stats

Way back in April, Endgame Viable became a year old, statistically speaking. That is to say, in April, I had accumulated my first full year of WordPress site statistics. (The Endgame Viable “brand” was actually born on October 16, 2013, while the first post on this blog-ie. the database that powers this blog-was June 29, 2012.) I’m not one to keep a close eye on statistics, but they can be useful to see what “works” and what “doesn’t work,” and some new bloggers might be interested in what I’ve learned.

The biggest thing I learned: People really love to search for information about ArcheAge. My most popular posts and incoming search terms-by far-have been about ArcheAge. So if you’re starting a new blog and you’re looking for a subject that will rocket you to stardom, I’d recommend ArcheAge. In particular I’d recommend topics on how to cheat… errr… get ahead in ArcheAge. :)

The most popular non-ArcheAge post I did was the one about the Best Subscription MMO. Not surprising given that the title is the exact phrase you’d type into a search engine.

Back in April and May of 2014, a lot of my referents came from Facebook. In June of 2014, they faded, and then in July, they stopped. I have no idea why or how people came from Facebook or why they stopped. (I have a page for Endgame Viable on Facebook but I’ve never done anything to cultivate it, and I stopped crossposting to it in January.) If anyone is reading this from Facebook, um, why are you doing that? :)

Apparently there’s this thing called “spam referrers.” I got a big chunk of referrers from places called buttons-for-website.com and make-money-online.com. I added some rewrites to my .htaccess to block them, but they keep changing their domain names every month though so that’s probably a losing effort. Now I just click the “spam” link in WordPress to hide them.

After search engines, Twitter is my second-highest traffic referrer. Except while Facebook was referring and it was my second-highest traffic referrer. (Seems like I should put Facebook integration on the old todo list.)

I got more comments on this blog in February 2015 than any other month.. I have no idea why. (This month is looking pretty good so far too.)

Looking at the most popular posts month-by-month, it seems pretty obvious that the most viewed ones tend to be reviews or first impressions. That seems logical, since those are probably the kinds of posts that come up in searches.

I don’t do anything to track RSS views. Now that I think about it, I don’t know if WordPress counts them in their statistics… probably not. Maybe I should look into that.

Posted on Blaugust Day 12. Read all of my Blaugust posts here.