MBWA 2012 in review

6 1/2 years into my hosted WordPress blog, the only complaint I’ve ever had is the statistics are a bit weak. As someone who ran a Web site analysis company more than a decade ago,  it’s always been surprising to me that all of the reports are based on page views.

However, the statistics have significantly improved over the last year. For example, the reports now distinguish between views, visits and visitors. In the last month I’ve averaged 1.6 views per visitor. Since very few visitors are tracked across sessions, this suggests that 1 out of 2 visitors to my blog reads two posts. That’s a pretty good result.

On the fun side, the so-called WordPress “stats helper monkeys” prepare an annual report. Here’s a (slightly-edited) excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. Manage By Walking Around was viewed about 83,000 times in 2012. If my blog were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take more than 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Shout out to Shawn Carter.

From their report, these are the posts on my blog that got the most views in 2012:

  1. 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life July 2012
  2. Performance Management Quotes Feb 2009
  3. Scorecards vs. Dashboards Aug 2006
  4. Dilbert on risk management Dec 2008
  5. Culture eats strategy for breakfast May 2010

Since it’s ranked third, even though I wrote the post 6 years ago, I can only assume people are still confused about the difference between a scorecard and a dashboard.  Maybe that’s good news: people will keep reading my blog.

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3 Responses to MBWA 2012 in review

  1. wildsage2 January 2, 2013 at 2:32 pm #

    What if you graded success on number of comments?

    • Jonathan January 2, 2013 at 3:07 pm #

      If I ranked by comments all-time (there’s no way to filter only by one year), the list would look like:

      1) 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life, 76 comments
      2) The Politics of Brand, 27 comments
      3) Our Memories Are Cloudy, 25 comments
      4) Are You Reading My Blog? 22 comments
      5) Scorecard vs. Dashboards, 19 comments

      So the scorecard post still makes the top 5.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. MBWA 2013 in review | Manage By Walking Around - January 1, 2014

    […] It has become an annual traditional here at MBWA to do a short assessment of how my blog has done in the past year.  Unfortunately most of the available statistics are classic ego metrics but I can usually dig out a few interesting conclusions. In last year’s assessment, I even managed to channel Jay-Z. […]

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