Who Reads This Blog?

I was looking at the analytics for this blog today, and I noticed some interesting things. It's been a while since I had time to really look in depth at the stats, and things have changed since I did it last. Here are just some interesting facts about who reads this blog, and how they get here, in no particular order.

1. Nearly a third of all traffic last month was direct traffic, meaning people typed my URL into their web browser. This is super interesting to me, because I tend to assume that those views make up a very small portion of my readership.

2. Facebook referrals make up about a quarter of my views, which makes a lot more sense to me. I do a lot of promotion there. If anything, I'm actually surprised that number isn't even larger.

3. Google Plus and deviantART round out my social views with just a few percent each. This shows a big shift, as in the past a large percentage of my views came from Google Plus.

4. About 11% of my views come from search engines (Google and Bing), and of that, a quarter are new visitors, which is a surprising number. I would expect most of the search hits I would get would be from family members and other people specifically looking for my blog.

5. About 8% of my views come from referrals from other blogs. One site I get a lot of referrals from is the blog of a real life friend of mine, and that makes sense, but the other referrals are from a much, much larger blog of a homeschool family in my local area. I'm not actually sure where those views are coming from, but I would suspect they are from a time that I commented on that blog several months ago.

One interesting thing to take away from viewing these stats is that a lot more people read my blog than interact with it. And also, some of these views are far more valuable than others. People who come from social sources tend to stay longer, and view more pages, but direct views are more likely to comment. Search engine views and referrals tend to span short visits with little interaction.