Ahh… those hit rate. When I see someone with 6-digit hit-rate on their book blogs I can’t help but exclaimed a “wow” under my breath and wonder what magical potion that the blog owner had used in the past years to achieve such wonderful stats.
I started off this blog because I needed an avenue to express my thoughts about a book and any other bookish reflection or thoughts. Along the way, I drew in wonderful people who recommends great books to me, who send some books to me, and I learn to appreciate literature a lot more.
I feel while it is nice to know that my blog hit rate has increased (even when my blogging activities had reduced), but it is not the only reason why I blog. I watch my hit rate, but I knew a major part of it is generated from reader’s hits who are not direct hit and who are not readers who came directly to my blog to read what I have to say in the first place. They are here because one of my blog picture appears in google images or google search engine.
So I experiment.
I experiment with feeding my post to Google reader in partial feed to see if it increase in my stats, now that the readers have to click the link to get into my blog. What I found was that this has insignificant impact on my hit rate, in fact reader who reads my blog through google reader is not counted in my total hit rate.
It is quite intriguing this hit rate.
I believe when you build a vast content on your blog the effort are not wasted but it would still draw hit rate from google search.
I am thinking of experimenting again.
This time I am going to shut off search engine and see how many direct visits I get.
What about you? Do you care about hit rate?
Something scientific about hit rate:
According to a Blog Traffic Analysis shared by Mint Blogger there is a difference between hit and visit:
The most misunderstood metric is ‘Hits’ on your blog. It is often confused with ‘Visit’. Whenever you visit a web page, several files may be downloaded from the web server to properly render a web page. It may include css files, javascript files, image files, flash files and other miscellaneous resources. Every time a resource is requested from the web server, it is counted as a ‘Hit’. So, a single web page request may result in 5, 10 or may be 100 hits, depending on how much resources (files) a web page is using.
Normally, hits are calculated on per hour basis using the following formula.
JoV's Book Pyramid 
I care very much about my hit rate and I look at it several times a day. Although, in WordPress it’s called “Views” so I think that’s different from hit rates, it hopefully is the number of times a particular page is viewed rather than the web server hit rate.
In wordpress I can also see how many people today found my blog via a search engine. So I don’t need to do your experiment, I can even see what they searched for. Isn’t it sweet, someone searched for “leeswammes Judith” yesterday? 🙂
Oh, I see that you are also on wordpress, so you don’t need to do this experiment either? Unless you want to do something that I didn’t quite understand.
Anyway, with the search engine stats it says “Total views referred by search engines” and most search terms only lead to 1 view. So I’m tempted to think that these are actual views and not hits, since most of my blog posts have at least one picture.
In my case, yesterday, about 1/3 of all my views came from search engines.
Posted by Leeswammes | March 20, 2011, 3:32 pmJust as a tv station need to know how many viewers, blogs need to know how many visitors as well.
I’ve been using Google Analytics after switching from wordpress.
As from my previous experience, some traffic do come from wordpress as there links from other wordpress blogs.
You might want to work on Search Engine Optimization if you would like to improve your traffic.
Posted by Marvin | March 20, 2011, 3:49 pmMarvin,
You will have to tell me what search engine optimisation is. Sounds complicated!
Posted by JoV | March 21, 2011, 10:39 pmJoV, to me hit rates and related stats are interesting to look at but not all that important. The one stat I do care about is the number of comments received, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to have a “dialogue” with others if you don’t know what they think about a post (good, bad or indifferent). Of course, the quality of a comment is even more important to discussion–but I’ve rarely met a comment I didn’t like! As someone who occasionally blogs in Spanish in addition to English, I am super excited to see countries like Argentina, Spain, and Mexico appearing in my list of top countries after the U.S. to visit my blog, but that’s just me. And it’s not really all that important unless they leave a comment, after all, ha ha. Cheers!
Posted by Richard | March 20, 2011, 5:25 pmI use Google Analytics and it is addictive to look at all kind of statistics. It is very useful. Still, I would recommend a book we reviewed recently and it is called Obliquity. It says that you have to concentrate on other things to achieve your goals. If you concentrate too much on the immediate goal you lose the big picture. As Richard said, enjoy exchange of comments, nice books and all other things and visitors will come naturally.
Posted by CuriousBookFan | March 20, 2011, 9:49 pmThanks CuriousBookFan, I’ll check out Oliquity. Thanks for the advice.
Posted by JoV | March 21, 2011, 10:41 pmI can honestly say no, I don’t care about my hit rate. If I got an increase in hit rate what would it mean? I’m not going to use my blog to make money or advertise or do any of the other things where that number would matter so I can’t get excited about having more – or less – views than yesterday.
My blog is actually quite a personal thing – somewhere I get to write about something I love (as opposed to the writing I do in my day job which is not about anything I even like). I get joy from the process of writing a post that I think will be useful to others and maybe even make them laugh a little. I get joy from the comments left, the emails sent to me from the blog’s readers and the discussions that take place about my posts which are fed into the Friend Feed Crime Fiction group (a space where loads of crime fiction blogs all feed into and we have discussions there about everyone’s posts). For me personally there’s no particular joy in a hit rate because I can’t interact with a hit rate – it’s just a number with nothing useful to me attached to it. I’m sure it would be different if I were trying to make money from the blog but as I’m not it’s one less thing I have to worry about 🙂
Posted by bernadetteinoz | March 20, 2011, 10:28 pmI like to check my blog stats-but is is really comments that are most rewarding
Posted by Mel u | March 21, 2011, 2:53 amI am with Mel U. Stats means nothing, the most important thing is comment.When someone commenting in out post, at least we know they aren’t just passing through to get whatever pictures we have uploaded.
I once had almost 500views with no comment at all…that’s sucks
Posted by Novroz | March 23, 2011, 6:56 amI must think something of how many ‘hits’ or ‘views’ I get because I do like to check during the day how many I have had that day, but it isn’t the be all and end all. Ive had months of awful view statistics and I’m still here! lol. At the end of the day I like to write and talk about books, and blog is the best way to do…its just nice to know someone reads it now and again 🙂
Posted by jessicabookworm | March 21, 2011, 7:45 amThank you everyone who offers your views about this. Comments carry more weight than any hit rate would, for me I am perpetually fascinated about how things work. So even if I see stats for number of referral from search engines I still wonder how is it that the sum of all referrals add up does not equal to what is shown at the bar chart.
All that being said, I’m glad I brought this up so that I could hear about your thoughts. As Bernadette rightly said, I don’t use my blog to make money anyway, why would I care? but I’m curious as to how these hits and stats are generated. (Not sure what I did right, with this post it hits view rate of an all time high!) LOL.
Posted by JoV | March 21, 2011, 8:28 amI’m interested in the views (that’s what wordpress uses, I just heard about hit rate from you), but more on the fluctuations of it. Some days I get really really high numbers and I can’t for the life of me figure out what happened. Didn’t seem I even posted something. Sometimes the graph peaks when I post something awesome (maybe. At least I’d like to think that way ;). The two interesting peaks that happened recently were the day when Shaun Tan won an Oscar and Will Eisner’s birthday 94th birthday (honored with Google Doodle). I guess it’s quite obvious they were search engine results, but intrigued me nonetheless. Anyway to sum up, stats are interesting but I’m not obsessed over it 🙂
Posted by mee | March 21, 2011, 10:56 amMee, do you realise when you click on one of the bars (for instance, the peak ones) you will get a stats overview so you can see where all these people came from? Quite usefuL!
Posted by Leeswammes | March 21, 2011, 11:08 amYes I did click on them and checked. But there doesn’t seem to be one strong source. They’re scattered from all over the place. It’s a wonder.
Posted by mee | March 22, 2011, 10:08 pmI am not concered with hit rates or views. I do check every once in awhile because I do believe they can be indicators on whether or not a blog is easy to read, loads quickly, etc, but I don’t care the way other bloggers do.
Posted by Ti | March 21, 2011, 8:11 pmI couldn;t be bothered at all by my stats use rule my life now not bothered my hit rat constant ,end day i blog about books i lpve and couuldn’t be bother if people like them or not I do and that is all that matters ,all the best stu
Posted by winstonsdad | March 23, 2011, 12:06 pmHey, try out Google Analytics. It should answer all your questions and more. I know you love graphs and charts. I think that tool is perfect for you.
Posted by Wilfrid | March 28, 2011, 12:12 amBack to your question on do I care about my hit rate. I think I am happy if my hit rate is of a reasonable level. And not too massive that I have to fan off all the bullies and trouble makers. What do I do to increase my hit rate? Nothing. Just keep writing. In short, I don’t think I really care at all 🙂
Posted by Wilfrid | March 28, 2011, 12:14 amWilfrid, don’t care is best! I need to explore what Google Analytics can do. Thanks.
Posted by JoV | March 28, 2011, 9:43 amAt the beginning of 2006 I decided to undertake a year-long case study of Google Analytics. I havent finished my case study as I prefer to look at data over the span of a year but the numbers Im seeing from Google Analytics are disturbing.
Posted by business daily | April 4, 2011, 5:46 pmHit rates are interesting to look at, i.e. where do people come from? what keywords did they search to land on my blog? But hit rates are not that important to me. I know I’ll boost hitrates when I actively interact with other bloggers by leaving lots of comments. At one point I was leaving comments and reading all the blogs on my link page until I just couldn’t keep up. Hitrates fall tremendously as soon as I stop. It becomes more important to me that readers care what I read and what I get out of my readings. After all, the blog is just a conversation of my mind.
Posted by Matthew | April 15, 2011, 8:47 pmMatt, it really makes my day when I receive a comment but don’t feel blue if your hit rates go down. I agree, my blog is really a conversation what I think about what I read too! Thanks for sharing Matt.
Posted by JoV | April 16, 2011, 7:46 pm