things my poll taught me

(this poll, which you can still fill in if you feel so inclined. I might just check back there later)

  • 163 people answered the poll
  • 80% follow for david tennant
  • 41% follow for supernatural
  • 36% follow for jensen ackles
  • (44% follow for either spn or spn or both)
  • 52% follow for sherlock
  • 15% follow for all four
  • 6% follow for everything but david tennant
  • 28% follow for only david tennant
  • 3% follow only for sherlock (sorry guise XD)
  • 35% of those who follow for david tennant also follow for spn and/or jensen

what did I learn? well, uhm. as usual when I do stats thingies, I mostly satisfy my need for statistics rather than for any sort of useful information…

bonus, though? your comments:

  • The Nili fandom!
  • NILI
  • nili
  • the sweetest person fandom
  • coz i love you
  • You. :3
  • gif tennis which isn’t really a fandom but still :D
  • I FOLLOW YOU FOR YOUR FACE LINDA
  • you´re brilliant hon <3
  • because you appreciate black books and dara obrien, also moran

also two votes for jensen’s tongue XD

so this is how I spent the first afternoon of 2012. I went back through my blog all the way to when I started posting (I opened my account in the spring of 2010 but didn’t post a thing until april 2011) and had a look at how you guys behave and where most of my followers come from. not that I’m addicted to stats or anything…

the first graph shows the relationship between the number of follows (I recieve emails for each follow — still) and the few spot-checks of the actual number of followers I’ve made.
the red line is what my follower count would be if no one had unfollowed me (or deleted their account etc. I haven’t factored in people who have unfollowed and then refollowed. there are a few but those are then counted once for each follow). the blue line are the spot-checks for landmark follower numbers (you can see them in this tag). the red circles on the blue arrows indicates the difference between the two numbers.

as suspected, the difference between the number of follows and the actual number of followers increases the more followers I have.

the second graph is the number of followers I’ve gained per day. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, to satisfy my curiosity about what brought you here and made you click the follow button. I can tell from going through my follower e-mails where the supernatural followers start trickling in (late november), but the overall conclusion from analysing the peaks is that David Tennant gifs bring more followers than anything else.

but that does not necessarily mean that that is still the case. the behaviour makes sense, because the first few surges of followers I gained I gained through the doctor who blog and through posting Much Ado About Nothing photos. the followers I gained at that time would be more likely to reblog tennant than anything else, and so those posts would spread quicker and thus bring in more followers. as my supernatural followers grow in numbers, so does the spread of my gifs and… well, I’m sure you can spot the pattern.

I’ve noted a few of the interesting peaks in the second graph, but I’ve analysed each one. generally the conclusion is what you might expect — posting new content will bring in a surge of followers (and for some reason doing ask-spams have generated new followers for me…). the surges sometimes only last the day of posting, but sometimes the pattern of continuing but diminishing number of followers for a day or two after posting something new. obviously I haven’t analysed the spread of reblogs, but I suspect that the wider something is reblogged outside your usual circle the longer the surge will last. that’s just speculation, though.

there’s no real reason for me to have put this together. it won’t change my blogging behaviour in the slightest — this is not a step in me trying to figure out how to get followers. in the end, you guys are people and not robots and you will follow if you see something you like. still; I do find the stats incredibly fascinating. :)

what a week of google analytics tells me about my blog

so a week ago I connected my blog to google analytics. it’s interesting stuff, let me tell you. I’ve never been good at maths, but stats always fascinate me (which is why I like last.fm so much).

So based on the week of Dec 4 - Dec 11, here are a few things I’ve learned.

  • most hits on my blog is either “from” tumblr.com (i.e. through reblog and/or source links) or direct traffic (i.e. you typing in my url). the bounce rate is around 60% for these visits (a 100% bounce rate means people only visit one page and then leave).
  • a few hits come from google searches and facebook posts (wtf?), but the bounce-rate on these hits are over 90% so they aren’t worth much in the long run
  • the hits with the lowest bounce-rates come from fellow blogs. no surprises, laura is at the top for referrals, but ania is also on the list (♥). the people who click through from laura’s blog have the lowest bounce-rate (40%), making those visitors the “higher quality” visitors - by the looks of it more likely to follow.
  • 60% of new visits to my blog are from the US (and 60% of those are from California)
  • It tells me that Swedish people spend longest (an average of 12 minutes) on my blog per visit, but I feel that statistic may just be skewed quite dramatically by the fact that I browse to my own blog from a couple of different computers every week. Still, I’m not all of those 80-something unique visits last week, am I?
  • Other frequent visitor countries are Australia, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands (laura!?) and — no surprise to me — Poland. After Swedes, Polish visitors spend the longest on my blog (an average of 5 minutes) which, I’m guessing, is because ania tells them all to come read my fanfic. :D
  • In a week, my blog has had nearly 2,500 visits (almost 6,000 pageviews!) — of which just over 1,500 were unique visits. On average you view 2.44 pages per visit, spending an average of three minutes on my blog each time. 58% of the hits I get are new hits, and the remaining is returning traffic. 

This stuff is amazingly interesting.

… well, it is for me, anyway.