Until recently, my visitor stats did not mean much to me. I simply did not have enough traffic, nor did I spend enough time analyzing it, to learn much. I still have relatively little traffic coming to my site and can think of several factors responsible--infrequent posting (I don't post quite every day), type of subject matter (social and environmental justice issues, literature, and writing), breadth of subject matter (see long list of categories), and the lack of a following (visitors who check back regularly).
Since I began writing for BC Magazine, I've noticed brief spikes in traffic after publishing an article with them. The highest spike came about a week ago, after my review of Andrew Beierle's novel, First Person Plural, was simultaneously published by BC and syndicated to the Advance.net and Boston.com news sites. My visitors over the next couple of days shot higher than they'd ever gone before.
I realized that the syndication of my book review resulted in a much wider audience, which in turn was driving the traffic back to my site. So when I published another book review a week later, this time of Nancy Alonso's Closed for Repairs, and it also was chosen for syndication, I half expected similar spikes in traffic. They did not materialize. Certainly not today, though I will still watch tomorrow closely.
So I got to thinking. Why would one review draw more visitors than the other? Both reviews received the same potential audience, the same exposure--blogcritics.org and my blog, as well as the advance.net family of news sites and the Boston Globe site. They were also both published at the start of the week. So the difference in traffic generated lies, I think, in the demographic appeal of the subject matter of each review, and to some extent, perhaps, also in the freshness on the market of each book--the first review was of a book not yet released, while the second was of a book already on the market, but recently released in translation. Some books, because of their subject matter, appeal to a much wider audience. Some audiences, also, have more buying power.
What does all this analysis of visitor stats mean to me? Not all that much. I find it all interesting, in an academic sort of way, but think an over-reliance on quantity over quality can be treacherous. The number of people drawn to my site by a particular post, article, or review does not matter as much as the type of person drawn. Larger numbers may equal more exposure, but the type of visitor determines where and how far that exposure can take me.
