Blog Stats: Traffic Sources
We’ve recently activated Google Analytics on all our Blogger blogs, and the results were… interesting.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS VS BLOGGER STATS
We expected the numbers to be different, but not this different. For instance, our review of The First Omen has over 700 views according to Blogger but less than 10 according to Google Analytics (GA). That’s just too much. We can see the number of sessions by users, so if there were 1 person or bot repeatedly clicking on the link, it should’ve turned up on the Dashboard. However, GA shows only 1 session per user. Also, the number of views keeps rising on Blogger stats while remaining static on GA. From the The Weird Cats of Ulthar (TWCOU) Dashboard, we can see that GA includes RSS Feed readers, so it’s not that. The geographical data is also surprising, as with Blogger stats we had the China, Hong Kong, and now Singapore surges, but GA shows most views from the US. We’ve seen an increase in views from the US on Blogger stats, too, but GA is ignoring several other countries. Even if it’s only a couple of people using different VPNs, it shouldn’t see through them, should it? Because it certainly doesn’t see through ours.
SOURCES
But it’s not just the numbers that are confounding us, there’s also the traffic sources. We occasionally get Twitter on Blogger stats, had Threads more than once, and only 2 for Bluesky ever. For a while now, we’ve been getting ‘Other’, which basically means Blogger doesn’t know what it was. On GA, the sources are Twitter and Facebook referrals, mostly Facebook. In fact, the first 5 views of The First Omen review were all from Facebook. Since we’re not there, we’re guessing this is coming through Threads. So, we’re getting most of our views from a social media platform we’re not even on? And even though Threads’ algorithm buries posts with links, and our views in general are abysmal, it’s also suggesting our posts with links to Facebook users? How about not quashing them on their own damned platform? Ugh! What doesn’t show up is also interesting. There was a single Bluesky mention, which tells us that GA can identify it as a source, and as we wrote above, it already showed up twice on Blogger stats. Now, it’s possible people are reaching our blogs thanks to the links we post there without clicking through from the posts, but the obvious conclusion is that posting links on Bluesky is useless. None of the Feeds we post to exclude posts with links, so that’s not the issue, and people do like and re-post them. However, no one seems to be actually clicking on them, which is, of course, the goal of posting them on a social media platform in the first place.
When we check Blogger stats after posting a link, Twitter always results in more views, even if it doesn’t always show up as a source. The results from Threads are very uneven, but posting on Bluesky usually results in a deafening silence. The review for The Nun II was pretty telling: 2 views after posting on Bluesky, twice that from Threads (and of course, GA’s numbers were lower but had Facebook as a source), and a big jump after we posted the link on Twitter (which didn’t turn up on GA). Yes, we know that increase could be from bots looking for a comments section to spam, but Bluesky rarely gives us anything, be it bot or human. Sure, it could be that people are finding the post later, but there was stuff we only posted on Bluesky that had 0 initial results and kept having 0 results, so we doubt that, especially as we’re always seeing Facebook as a source. Getting there from Threads, yes, but from Bluesky? It doesn’t make sense.
As more and more people started leaving Twitter/X and Bluesky finally introduced a threads-making function (still no drafts, though), we announced we were doing the same, added a warning to our bio, and made the account private. Thankfully, we didn’t delete it, as we wanted to make sure no one got our handle (yes, we know how ridiculous and deluded that sounds). We say thankfully because after the dip in views, we decided to reopen our Twitter account, even if in a limited capacity. So, we won’t be posting those longer reviews, but rather book quotes and the occasional short opinion on a movie we watched to which we’re now adding the movie poster to make it look less boring. There’s still many normal people there, so it’s not as if we’re the only ones, but it was still disheartening realizing that we couldn’t really break free.
AND NOW WHAT?
We really don’t know what to do with this information. Our follower count and engagement on Threads are still ridiculously low, but we’re obviously not joining Facebook. Returning to Twitter/X may have helped with Blogger stats, but it has had less of an effect with GA. Everyone is gushing about Bluesky, including on Threads, and we do get more immediate engagement there, but that doesn’t translate into blog views (or book downloads). To make things even messier, as you may (or may not) have noticed, we’ve returned to WordPress.com with The Snarky Cats of Ulthar (yes, we will bitch about it in the next post) (sorry), so now we get another set of stats to mull over. And yes, we already had Facebook as a source and 0 views from links that were posted only on Bluesky… Unlike last time, though, the blog is connected to the bigger WordPress.com community and we already got views and likes from there, which is nice.
