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| Statistical Analysis of a Blog’s Traffic Posted: 21 Nov 2008 01:26 PM PST Today blogger and MBA student Eric Rosenberg fromThe Israel Situation and Narrow Bridge Adventures talks us through some statistical analysis of the traffic to his blog. As a hobby blogger trying to increase readers to my Israel blog, The Israel Situation, I have always been glued to my site traffic. What does a spike mean? How can I bring more readers? Is there anything I can do to help my blog grow? I am currently an MBA student, and I took a statistics class this past quarter. For a class project, I tried to use statistics to prove what you can do to help your blog grow. I used a lot of technical tests including regression, chi-squared, and correlations to prove my theories. Darren gave me the opportunity to share my findings with all of you, and I have translated the findings into plain English to help you grow your blog readership. I first tested to find a relationship between posts per day and site visitors. I started my blogging believing that the key to more visitors was more posts. Not true! A two sample test comparing site visitors to page loads proved that there is no association between the two. If you are working your tail off to post ten times a day, it might be better to focus your efforts on fewer, better quality posts. Next up I tried to find a way to drive subscriber growth. I tested the relationship between page views and subscriber count. A two sample t-test (statistics talk for two variable relationship test) proved that again, there is no relationship. At this point, it seemed that no numbers could predict a successful blogger, but I continued my testing.
Next, I used a test called chi-squared to find if day of the week had any big impact in visitors. The test is designed to test if proportions are equal across periods. I did find a difference here. I found that there were constantly more visitors on Sunday and fewer on Friday and Saturday. This, I believe, is specific to my target audience. Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, is from Friday night to Saturday night. As a blog that focuses on Israel, many of my visitors are Jewish. This explains the difference. If you have a blog with a niche audience, you might find this variation as well. A business blog, for example, may have a spike in readers on Monday morning at the beginning of the week and less visits on the weekend.
My next test is the one that applies to virtually every blogger. I tested page views against time. I found that time since starting the blog does correlate to an increase in page views. At first I had trouble substantiating this data. I removed outliers, or non-regular data, and was able to then prove my hypothesis. As you can see from my chart, I was able to demonstrate that days since blog inception closely related to an increase in regular visits. My spikes in traffic, caused by Reddit and hosting the Haveil Havalim blog carnival, did not cause an increase in traffic. Just to reiterate, social bookmarking and other spikes in traffic did not cause a statistically significant increase in blog viewers. You can see the five dots that stick out in the chart below. Those are my big days of social bookmarking and blog carnival hosting.
To summarize what I found and apply it to you, the most important factor in growing your blog is persistence. Sticking with it will lead to a real increase in visits. If you write good content, it is inevitable that you will gain more readers. Traffic spikes, like the one I hope to get from guest posting here, are nice. However, most people that visit in a spike don't really care about your blog, they care about the single post. If you can pick up a few regulars, great, but don't expect a whole lot. If you are still starting out, do not give up from a low reader count. I almost did a few times, but decided to stick with it because Israel is something I am passionate about. If you are writing about something you love, you will have a readership increase in time. Other than that, the statistics of blogging are fairly inconclusive. Eric Rosenberg is the author of two blogs: The Israel Situation and Narrow Bridge Adventures. He has been blogging for about two years. |
| How I added the Twitter ID field to comments on Twitip.com Posted: 21 Nov 2008 06:06 AM PST A couple of days ago I added the ability for those leaving comments on my TwiTip Twitter Tips blog to add their Twitter ID as well as their URL to comments. Since doing this I’ve been asked time and time again how we did it. In this guest post Sean Walberg (the guy who actually made it happen and who is my server admin on TwiTip) explains how he did it. If you’ve been to Twitip.com in the past couple of days, you’ve probably noticed that commenters have Twitter IDs in their posts:
This was something Darren thought up while we were preparing to move his server, and asked me to put it in place. Twitip runs on WordPress, which is easily extended through plugins. Fortunately, someone wrote a plugin to take care of most of what’s needed to do this. The steps we’ll follow here are:
The first thing you’ll need is the Extra Comment Fields plugin. I used Version 1.2 Beta if you want a direct download link. There’s one PHP file in there that you’ll put in your wp-content/plugins/ directory. When you go back to your WordPress Admin page, you’ll see the Extra Comment Fields plugin in the Inactive Plugins section of your Plugins page (off to the right of your screen, between Settings and Users). Activate this plugin. The Extra Comment Fields plugin is tricky in that there are several references to the field name, and they all have to match (including the case). I chose “twitter” which should be easy enough to remember. From the WordPress Admin screen, navigate to Settings, then Extra Comment Fields. (If you don’t see Extra Comment Fields in the list of plugins, go back a step and make sure you activated it) Type “twitter” into the text box and click “Add Field”. Your screen should look like this:
This step makes the necessary changes to the database to store the comment. Heed the warning you see, if you delete this field, it removes the column in the database. Next, go into your theme directory, it’s in wp-content/themes/. Darren runs Thesis, so we’re looking at wp-content/themes/thesis. Open up comments.php. Find the spot where the comment form is displayed by looking for comment_author_url. You’ll want to add a new comment field with the name of “twitter”. This will depend a lot on your theme, but cutting and pasting goes a long way here. The big change, though, is that WordPress doesn’t keep this value in your cookie, so you can’t pre-populate this in the value attribute (in simpler terms, people who have commented before will have their name, email, and URL filled in, but not the Twitter ID). In Thesis, you’ll have: else { // Otherwise, give your name to the doorman ?> <p><input class="text_input" type="text" name="author" id="author" value="<?php echo $comment_author; ? >" tabindex="1" /><label for="author"><?php _e('Name', 'thesis'); ?></label></p> <p><input class="text_input" type="text" name="email" id="email" value="<?php echo $comment_author_emai l; ?>" tabindex="2" /><label for="email"><?php _e('E-mail', 'thesis'); ?></label></p> <p><input class="text_input" type="text" name="url" id="url" value="<?php echo $comment_author_url; ?>" tabindex="3" /><label for="url"><?php _e('Website', 'thesis'); ?></label></p> <p><input class="text_input" type="text" name="twitter" id="twitter" value="" tabindex="4" /><label for ="twitter"><?php _e('Twitter id', 'thesis'); ?></label></p> <?php In the default theme, it’ll look like this: <?php else : ?> <p><input type="text" name="author" id="author" value="<?php echo $comment_author; ?>" size="22" tabindex="1" <?php if ($req) echo "aria-required='true'"; ?> /> <label for="author"><small>Name <?php if ($req) echo "(required)"; ?></small></label></p> <p><input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="<?php echo $comment_author_email; ?>" size="22" tabindex="2" <?php if ($req) echo "aria-required='true'"; ?> /> <label for="email"><small>Mail (will not be published) <?php if ($req) echo "(required)"; ?></small></label></p> <p><input type="text" name="url" id="url" value="<?php echo $comment_author_url; ?>" size="22" tabindex="3" /> <label for="url"><small>Website</small></label></p> <p><input type="text" name="twitter" id="twitter" size="22" tabindex="4" /> <label for="twitter"><small>Twitter ID</small></label></p> <?php endif; ?> At this point load your site in your browser to make sure everything looks OK. The last step is to print the Twitter ID alongside the comments. This is also done in comments.php. The comments are printed out in a loop which varies from theme to theme. In Thesis, you’ll start right after: <?php thesis_hook_before_comment_meta(); thesis_comment_meta($comment_number); thesis_hook_after_comment_meta(); ?> (It’s entirely possible there’s an easier way to do this in Thesis) In the default theme, you’ll see the following, and you’ll want to start right before it. <?php comment_text() ?> Wherever you end up starting, insert the following code: <?php if ($comment->extra_twitter) { // Strip out the @ if they put it there because we're going to need to get rid of it for the url anyway $extra_twitter = preg_replace("/^@/", "", $comment->extra_twitter); $extra_twitter = htmlentities($extra_twitter); ?> <a href="http://twitter.com/<?=$extra_twitter ?>">@<?=$extra_twitter?></a> <?php } // extra_twitter ?> The Extra Comment Fields plugin puts the data from the twitter field in a method of the $comment object called extra_twitter (and if you called your variable foo, it would be called extra_foo, and so forth). The above code checks to see if it’s been set (that is, someone submitted a Twitter ID), and if so, strips off any leading “@”. This allows people to enter their Twitter IDs both with and without the @. The code then calls the htmlentities function to strip out any funny stuff, and then print it out as a link. If you want to style the link with any CSS, change the HTML accordingly. That’s it! Sean Walberg is a network guy, freelance author, and systems administrator. |
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