Welcome to part two of three in a series of posts thanking readers, and taking a step back to review Amdall Gallery’s status as we approach a subscriber milestone. In the first, I dropped a poll asking what sort of giveaway subscribers might be interested in, and shared a few cool artists I’ve come across through working on this website. In this post, we’re going to focus on data and statistics! Then, for the final entry to the series, we’ll have a giveaway/contest.
As part of this thought process related to subscribers, I also wanted to get a better idea of activity on the site. The WordPress dashboard gives you some basics, but doesn’t provide a full accounting of everything you might wonder about your site. I wanted to get more in-depth with number of interactions, user comments, likes, etc., so I made an unnecessarily detailed spreadsheet. I started by copying the full list of comments and posts from WP-Admin, highlighting and copying “likes” from each individual post, and then pasting each into their own Excel tabs. Then, I utilized functions and formulas to massage the data into structured columns, and dug into some Pivot Tables and graphs.
I uncovered a ton of information, but here are some interesting tidbits:
- I am responsible for 49% of the comments on Amdall Gallery (175 of the 356 total comments). That makes sense for the most part, because I try to respond to every comment.
- Slightly more views (53%) have occurred on research/analysis posts than on art posts (47%).
- The vast majority of likes have been for art posts (91%), which is logical because I believe likes only come from WordPress accounts. Artists who come across my site tend to come from WordPress, since they probably browse tags similar to mine.
- Most comments (79%) have been on art posts, compared to analysis posts (21%).
- So, overall: More people look at the analysis posts, but more people interact with the art posts.
- Adding up all total interactions (comments and likes), 41% are from a core group of 29 people who have commented or liked 10+ times. You could possibly consider these 29 users to be Amdall Gallery’s core audience, since they engage with posts most frequently.
- 11% of all interactions are from one-off visitors. 12% of interactions have actually been from me, all of which were comments (usually replies).
- 48% of users (152 people) who visited only have one interaction. 9% of users who have visited have 10+ interactions (these are the 29 users I mentioned before).
- Referral sites are a bit surprising; there is a very clear top three that includes the WordPress Reader (hurrah), Reddit, and Bing (seriously). The WP Reader is a personal favorite, so I’m glad to see that. Reddit is…well…a great example of how toxic the internet can be, so I share there sparingly now. But it’s an incredible source of traffic if you have thick skin. And Bing is well ahead of Google here!
And naturally, what would an analytic post be without some graph mania?
Figure 1. Sum of all interactions. Likes and comments all totaled, then grouped by user types.
Figure 2. Count of users with specified interaction numbers. First column is number of users with one interaction (like or comment), second is users with two or more, etc.
Figure 3. Posts categorized as Art versus categorized as Analysis. Listed by (left to right) total likes, views, and comments.
Figure 4. Scatter chart of the top 20 posts (ranking based on weighted interaction totals), with likes on the x-axis and comments on the y-axis.
Figure 5. Top 30 posts based on weighted interaction totals. Formula for weighted interaction normalizes each category using the highest totals for each (Weighted = Views + [Likes x 34] + [Comments x 68].
Figure 6. Traffic referrers by percentage of total.
Figure 7. Traffic referrers by total numbers.
Figure 8. Traffic by country, shown as percentage.
After I processed this data, I actually contacted WordPress to discuss more robust statistical data for administrators (something similar to info obtained through my data crunching). They were very receptive! Maybe at some point in the future, they will beef up the dashboard for weird spreadsheet junkies like me.
Anywho, that’s it for my over-analysis near the 300 subscriber (291 right now I think) milestone. This was incredibly interesting and fun for me, but something tells me I might be the only one who cared about this portion. Hopefully, the next post will be more interesting, since it involves a contest! And since I doubt we’ll have many entries, the chances of winning are probably fairly high. The only question now is, do I save the giveaway for when the site actually reaches 300? Or am I too impatient for that?