This is part of a series I call 'daily espressos', where I write down a stream of thoughts on a random topic!
For my tenth (finally after much procrastination!) daily espresso, I wanted to do some meta investigative work. One very cool feature of my blog is being able to see how many people have visited my site/pages, at what time, and where from. I guess this is ‘big data’ or Google analytics on an absolutely microscopic scale - and I was supremely excited to explore it.
Some findings are more intuitive than others. For example, in the last two weeks, the vast majority of the views have been split between the UK (573) and Hong Kong (524), with some viewers from the U.S. (43) and Canada (30). Some more baffling insights are the viewers from France (friends on holiday?), or from Japan, Indonesia, or Mauritius. But it's honestly so sick that there are people reading my stuff from all over the world!
It’s also really cool to see from what devices people are accessing the site. 91% are using mobile devices, which means I need to step up the mobile version of this instead of focusing on the desktop version (which is the default for Wix, the website builder I'm using)!
My main channel of promoting the blog is through Instagram, so I also use the analytics from there to keep track of how popular certain posts are. Usually, there are around 1.1K to 1.2K views per story, of which around 150-250 translate into clicks. So for example, the post on tiger parenting had around 190 direct clicks through the link in the story, with some other views from the link in my bio and from viewers looking up the article directly.
Another thing you can see through Instagram is the profile activity you garner through individual story posts. Here, the post on light skin led to 56 profile views, which is mildly confusing and far higher for profile views of other story posts, which are around 10-20. I wonder if people were trying to see what skin tone I was to check whether my dad's comments were warranted (?).
It’s also interesting to see that some posts gain more traction than others. Simply by looking at the number of views for each article, it's clear that the ones on sex are the most popular, probably because of supply/demand, or because it's just a taboo topic. Another popular thing is sharing personal stories or anecdotes, which also gets lots of really heartwarming story replies or messages from people! Finally, one thing I've learnt is to not post screenshots of the whole article through several stories, which probably makes sense because that takes away the whole point of reading the article separately.
Overall, I just thought the analytics were quite sick and I loved looking through how different posts performed. As a matter of reflection, I've also been generally happy about how much I've been able to write over the past two weeks, even though I have procrastinated on multiple occasions and sometimes just cannot muster the will to sit at my laptop and type. Other than making me just write more, I think having to produce some sort of content makes me more reflective of what's been going on in my day, which I also really appreciate. And if you've read this far, thank you so much - seeing all the views and the kind messages really make my day and keep me going! <3
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