2007 on Mike's Musings

2007 was the first full year for which I tracked traffic on this blog using Google Analytics. Well, most of the year. There were two brief periods, totaling about a week, when I had made template changes and forgot to re-install the Analytics code. But I think I have enough data to take a look at activity for the year.

There were 8,103 unique visitors, who stopped by 14,773 times and viewed 29,576 different pages. My busiest day for the year was September 14, with September 13 a close second. Based partly on data about individual page-views and Google search terms, I think that those dates were busiest because of several posts in the first part of September:

• Fifty Years Ago Today, in which I looked back at desegregation;
• Looks Like I'll Have to Make Friends With a Lawyer/Author from California, one of several posts this past year about lighthouses being sold;
• At The 29th Annual Bethany Beach Boardwalk Arts Festival, which featured the works of at least one popular artisan and touched on the contentious Delaware off-shore wind-farm proposal; and,
• We Have Met the Enemy and He is Those People, in which I took my own neighbors to task for their desire to wall-off our subdivision from a new one next door.

There was a lot going on just then.

Over the full year, a large majority of readers simply came to the blog's front page and read what-ever was newest. But there were a number of pages, some from several years ago, that continued to attract readers. Here are the top five:

• Pimping My Prius, from September of 2005, is about installing a Sirius Satellite Radio receiver in the Prius. This page was viewed 918 times in 2007. It has long been the most-viewed archive page.
• A Restaurant Recommendation Chain-Post, from May of 2007, is one of the few "memes" I have ever taken part in. By design, this meme carries links back to all participants and that chain of posts garnered 166 page-views in 2007.
• Hey! A Gravity-Monument Photo!, from May of 2005, also had 166 page-views in 2007. Anyone who has ever run across one of these puzzlers is bound to do a bit of Googling and that can lead to this page. There's also a link to it from TutorGig.Com's page on the Gravity Research Foundation.
• An Albino Deer? Or An Echo From the Distant Past?, from January of 2007, is about a white deer I spotted at Cape Henlopen State Park but also mentions a legend about a white deer from the Lenape people who once lived in this area. I've noticed lots of "white deer" searches over the years. This page had 147 page-views in 2007.
• Now, Here's a Surprise, from August of 2005, concerns my experience with a blood clot hat summer. This one gets many visits from folks searching for information on blood clots. I hope it helps people who stop by; it had 144 visits in 2007.
  

Search engines generated many visitors to Mike's Musings in 2007, but not the majority. Almost 53% percent of visits came through links from other sites, including Delaware On-line, Blogger (likely the risky "next-blog" link), several other Delaware bloggers (Delaware Liberal, TommyWonk, WGMD, and Down With Absolutes top that list), and (interestingly) via the link in my e-mail signature line.

A bit more than 32% of traffic to the site this past year came through search engines. Many were searching for "Mike Mahaffie" or for "Mike's Musings." Other popular searches were for combinations of sirius and prius and satellite, "how to get rid of a blood clot," and the Woods of Mahaffie.

About 15% of visitors were from "direct traffic," meaning people have bookmarked me (how nice) and checked back in (even nicer).

Most of my readers are from the United States though there were a good number of visitors from Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia and many non-English-speaking countries. Within the US, most visitors checked in from within Delaware and surrounding states. But I am pleased to see that I had visitors from every state, though only 3 from North Dakota.

I'll have to work up some North Dakota-specific content and try to target a Roughrider audience in 2007.