Discussions
Traffic Claims
Posted by monkeytale • 12/06/07 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Every now and then, either through thread titles or through various comments I've seen people claiming 1000, 2000, or more unique hits a day to their blogs.
While I don't dispute that some people are getting that kind of traffic there is one thing that perplexes me. In theory if someone is maintaining those numbers consistently it would indicate they have a pretty popular blog.
I've visited a few of them lately, just for the heck of it, and very few that are claiming that kind of traffic are getting many comments on their posts. While I realize not everyone comments on a blog post I've compared the ratio of visits I receive to comments received and it just doesn't add up. (It runs about 10%)
Very few of the people claiming to thousands of visitors a day have anywhere near that ratio. I just find that kind of odd.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? (Other than the thinking that the claims are bs. I'm sure that's the case in some instances but there are blogs receiving this kind of traffic with very few comments I'm sure.)
User Comments
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Well, with some of the way to get more traffic to a blog, a user of your blog might find himself at the wrong place, not the place he had hoped for. Also, who knows how many spam bots hit a site in a day.
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I think that's a good point, though I have no reason to doubt some of the claims here. I see some blogs with high page ranks that also get few comments. I think people are more inspired to comment based on the type of the blog. For example, I recently visited ProBlogger for the first time. I learned some interesting things, but never would have commented there. On the other hand, I commented on your blog (and either stumbled or dugg a post. Can't remember which), because it was the type of post that seemed to inspire communication. -
Sometimes it depends on the types of blogs.
2 days ago I got several thousand hits from stumbleupon, but not a single comment.
38 people gave my photo thumbs up so some of them seemed to like it. -
It depends on your audience and if you do research and document and reference or just blog opinion. Here in blog catalog people have the attitude what can you do for me ... hence discussions like "Want a review?," and "I want to see your blog." will get hundreds of hits, but a post like yours will get few hits and fade away. And then the quality of the hit ... a few seconds, minutes or hours. I manage about 3 hours a visit from 15% of my readers. -
lies, lies and damm statistics!-
You've got to be really careful when claiming any sort of visitor data if you're using that data as part of a business activity e.g to attract advertising.
If you're not, then its very difficult to dis-prove such statistics. I recently came across a post on webproworld where a guy was claiming wild in-accuracies between Google analytics and his usual stats count program.
At the end of the day - all the visitors in the world don't matter if none of them comment, link to or visit your website as a result of reading your blog.
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You have to take into account where the traffic is coming from too. I used to use blogexplosion a lot and would get hundreds of visits, but not many comments. They clicked and left. Not very quality traffic, but traffic nonetheless...-
Yeah, the traffic exchange sites like Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers, or Blogmad drive in the most useless traffic ever. I had forgotten about them.
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Yep, I bet a lot of it is a result of Stumble. Those folks technically use the thumbs-up as their comment.
I think out of the herds of Stumblers, only one person actually sent me a comment. But quite a number thumbs-upped.
Not to say that folks aren't intentionally or unintentionally sharing incorrect data.
Or misinterpreting HITS for unique visitors. (That's an easy mistake I've seen done often.) -
i think i know someone who did that, posted on the board of the thousand hits he was getting, he said he'd get thousands of hits but i could hardly see any comments on his blog and there's no way i could find out because i don't see any stat counters, maybe it's a way to attract more visitors to their blog, it's a coax to brag about the blog and get more attention perhaps, hihihi -
It really depends on the type of blog/traffic as everyone has mentioned. SU users tend to stay on the page for 20-50 seconds and then click away - many don't take the time to comment unless they've got their own site and it benefits them. I've gotten a few comments from SU users but most come from bloggers at BC. I try to share the love and comment back but when I can't I just Stumble a few of their posts that I like. But now I'm rambling and not even talking about the topic.-
The people here at BC seem to give me the most comments and the best interaction as well.
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I believe that google search users have a higher probability to leave a comment.
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I don't see many comments from people doing google searches. Most of my comments stem from BC actually.
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actually..many of google seach guys have commented on my blog..so i have such an impression. I get some 250-350 unique hits on my blog..which is quite moderate..and i get a fair share of comments as well
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My experience is more like Mike's, but I think it may be dependent on type of content, and whether readers are bloggers themselves.
For my aviation news blogs, 60-70% of my traffic comes from search, and those blogs get very few comments. The traffic levels are good and quite stable, but the content does not seem to stimulate comment. More importantly, as far as I can tell, most of the readers of those blogs are NOT bloggers themselves.
On the other hand, my more personal blog gets a fraction of the traffic the aviation blogs get, but most posts generate quite a few comments -- and a fair amount of the traffic comes from BC and MBL members. In other words, most of the readers of that blog ARE bloggers themselves, so they are more likely to comment and enjoy the community aspects of personal blogging.
Bobbie
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Many good points here. Why is traffic so important? To me the only reason to have traffic would be because I have ads on my site, and the higher the traffic the more likely that some of my visitors click my ads and I make money. Fine. If that's why you have a blog, so be it. But...the only way to tell whether your blog has quality is the number of comments. A quality blog will alway impact the visitor, even if that blog is not what the visitor was looking for in the first place and I have left many comments on blogs that from my personal point of view I had no interest in, but because the blog had quality, nice design and good writing style, hey, I liked and I left a comment and I may visit it again. Some people may blog for money, fine, keep boasting about your numbers, I may visit your blog once just to peek, but I will probably not come again. People who really write quality stuff have no need to boast about numbers, because the word goes around (in terms of Google search rankings or links from other blogs). Bottom line, if I have thousands of visitors but no one leaves a comment, that means my blog sucks...Just my two cents.-
Don't be such a hater.
I've seen many great blogs with zero comments. The reasons can be many, but I suspect they don't care about promoting, networking, etc.
I've also seen many mediocre blogs with tons of comments.
It's easy to get a lot of comments if you comment a lot yourself. -
Possibly the bragging may have to do with folks who want quantity of traffic simply for advertising purposes...
Or a quality blogger might just be really excited about their results, or trying to get a benchmark of their results against other bloggers.
It's pretty hard to make a determination of this across the board. The forums are helpful just for general communication so bloggers aren't so isolated in their experiences. And sharing traffic info is a part of that experience.
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You have the type of blog that people could comment on, some of the blogs I've visited would be harder to get involved in if you know what I mean. And yeah, I'd say some are counting hits rather than unique visitors while others might get traffic from an exchange site or a site like Stumble. I think repeat visitors and visit lengths are more valuable stats than the actual hits anyway.-
Repeat visitors and comments mean more to me than a lot of traffic which doesn't spend any time there, or return.
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I concur
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During the Halloween season, I kept getting MASSIVE traffic from an image that was a funny photo of two people dressed as 'white trash' with no teeth. This photo got close to 300 hits per day, while my own writing gets 150---if that.
So, it may be due to images or exposure...if the content is lacking. But, just because somebody doesn't have a lot of comments, doesn't mean they're not getting hit with mass mobs. -
I get a lot of google search traffic and google image traffic but they never leave comments. My site gets great traffic overall but the comments I get are from places I hang out like BC and Entrecard.
Bloggers seem to always be the response leavers. -
No one loves me everyone hates me I think I will go off and eat worms....apparently that is a line from a poem my partner loves to quote it to me when I am doing my the world sucks speech lol
I prefer to think I have footprints that come and sometimes leave an imprint -
I get around 7000 to 10000 page views per day, and sometimes, all I get is 4-5 comments in a day. Commenting rate depends on many factors.. the type of blog, the type of content.. I have some posts with over 100 comments, and other with 0..
I read somewhere that only 1-2% of people comment on a typical blog. -
My petlvr blog has been increasing in traffic lately, and according to sitemeter www.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s22petlvr averages about 500 uniques per day. According to my Dashboard:
Blog Stats
There are currently 2,718 posts and 403 comments, contained within 80 categories and 1,048 tags.
(I hope that is in addition to my RSS subscribers) Now .. I'm probably guessing that at least 50% of those comments are from me thanking other people for comments, and maybe 10% of the rest are spam that got through. So .. I might have maybe 180 legitimate comments on 2700 posts .. about 6% comment/post ratio.
The more and more traffic I receive .. is not from here or word of mouth - it's from search engines and now up to 78% of my traffic is from search engines. You can see my "refer" stats PetLvr.com/blog/refer/ ... these people are just looking for something - and move on and don't comment.-
I thought I would add another statistic from my Dashboard...
Spam
Akismet has protected your site from 54,785 spam comments. -
Wow! and I thought my 4,033 spam comments were bad!
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Kiltak: Wow, only 1 -2%? I don't get anywhere the views you do, but have a much higher than that % or comments. It does depend on the type of traffic, though. Sometimes Stumbleupon will generate hundreds of hits on a single post, but no more comments than usual. People who find my site using search engines seem to usually just spend a few minutes reading and then move on. I would estimate that 80% of my comments are from other bloggers and their comments really do add valuable content to my site!
-Will -
WT: Yeah I know.. it's sad.. but my content usually doesn't encourage people to comment.. I usually post about news or revolutionary technologies. the worse thing is that the 10000 page views are in addition to the 3200 RSS subscribers that never come on the blog.
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For someone who claims "reality is overrated", Mikster, you sure do like bringing reality up here.
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It's not traffic itself that's important, after all a bot counts as traffic... it's targeted traffic that a website owner is after. That's what converts best.
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It's all relative. There are many ways to measure blogs: traffic, comments, links, etc. but really it's a function of what the purpose of your blog is and how well it meets that purpose, imo. Generally, people tend to talk about their blog in terms of what is working for them (as opposed to what might not be). For example:
A highly visited one time, low time per visit blog, might just be capturing lots of search engines.
A highly commented on blog, might have a low but engaged readership.
A highly linked blog might have tapped into to certain bloggers (but might not appeal to non-blog readers).
Most measures on their own don't necessarily mean anything. For example, some of my posts with low comments were widely linked. Some of my posts with high traffic weren't linked or commented on by anyone. Some of my posts have high number of comments, but low traffic. RSS subscribers are one of the best measures, but not all subscribers read every post and some readers never direct people to the blog. My top post this year broke the 10,000 reader mark, but it was hardly the most thought provoking or even best written. So if there is any lesson here, and I'm not sure there is, it might be that it all works together. -
With blogs that deal with products and other items that are subject to many Google searches 1000-2000 unique hits/day can be pretty normal and even a bit low. I don't usually go over 2000-2500 or so in a day on my main blog (a beauty product review blog) unless I have been stumbled, but 1000/day without being newly stumbled or such is not unusual for me. Most of that traffic comes from search engines. -
Some of the traffic in my blog comes from google image search. And I must admit, it is such a big help. -
I don't claim hundreds of hits on my site. I have a hard time believing a lot of the statistics. I get 10-20 people a day who read my blog with 2-3 views per person 20-60 views per day. That is reality. It is very easy to see who is getting a lot of traffic. They are getting a lot of comments on their material. I can believe they are getting a lot of people if they have 10-30 comments per post. It would make sense, then you would know what they are looking at. I have a hard time also with some of the statistics, people are going to visit a blog once a week, to catch up on several days of posts. I expect over time the traffic will pick up. It has taken me a lot of time to figure out how to break the initial 5 per day, now 10 per day, maybe in a month or two 20-30 per day, then in maybe 5-6 months 50-60 per day. It takes time. I am learning. As I learn my traffic will increase. Quite frankly the traffic figures aren't believable unless I see a web counter. Show me one and I'll believe you.
Also most of the blogs have a counter on the side which gives statistics
for their blogs in blogcatalog. These are not matching with what people
are talking about. Very few people have counts above 1000 hits that is
not visitors.-
re 10--30 comments. keep in mind though that some visitors as well as the blog owner may post multiple follow up comments if the comments section of the blog post becomes a discussion (very much like the discussions that follow posts on this board). One blog I visit regularly functions much like this and the commentators often discuss the post with the author and with each other and more than 30 comments on a post is not unusual.
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The blog stats you see on blogcatalog are not the full stats for a blog. I believe they are either the stats for the page on blogcatalog or are for the referrals to the blog from here.
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The blog stats are only related to BC; from the little I know, that is correct.
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i think the comment to traffic ratio varies with each niche. But yeah i believe there is a ratio. I get around 150-250 uniques a day and i get around 10-15 comments. so around 7-8%
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