Inspired by the Book Blogger Stats Survey created by Pages Unbound in 2016 and conducted every two years, the Blogging Stats Transparency is an annual series of posts where I share my own stats from the past year. In addition to sharing numbers and data, I also share some insights on why I think something happened or didn’t happen.
Blog stats aren’t something we talk about in the community often, especially in the book blogging community, where we’re a bit more niche and our audience are frequently other bookish creators.
The goal of these posts is to normalize talking about our statistics in a community where it’s seen as taboo to do so (and therefore it’s uncomfortable) and to encourage others to share their own stats. Although these posts are geared toward the book blogging community specifically (because of most of the content here), you might learn something if you’re in another niche, too!
I compile the data in January and aim to share these posts in February or March each year.
What Data Do I Share?
Because stats, tools, and other things can change over time, each post begins with listing anything that happened throughout the year that might skew the data. This might include technical mishaps (on my part or externally), any posts being deleted/archived/made private in bulk, changes in the tools being used, etc.
- Total and Average Page Views: for average, this is using an educated guess based on recent data instead of doing the math, so it will always be a range
- Blog Followers via Jetpack
- Number of Posts: and how/if posting consistency affected traffic
- Comments and Engagement: for engagement, this includes the number of likes a post has on Jetpack
- Top 5-10 Most Viewed Posts — added in 2023 (exact number of posts TBD)
- Traffic Sources and Referrals: for traffic sources, I use Google Search Console Insights, which breaks it down into percentages from the last 28 days
- Audience by Country — added in 2023
Compilation of Posts
Since 2022’s post is the first post in this series, it also shares data beginning in 2018 (when I moved to WordPress), so there can be a foundational comparison. 2023’s post includes shares audience data over the years as it’s a new section added in.
Other Bloggers Who Share Their Stats
I try to update these as I find them each year. If you have your own series of Blogging Stats Transparency posts, please let me know so I can add your most recent one to the list!