Page Counts, Clicks, X-Cetra

Who's up for some blogging about blogging? Yes, I know it's not Blaugust any more but always remember, a blog is not just for August.

It all started when I replied to Tipa's comment on Wednesday's post. Not the one about Wednesday the show. The one I put up two days ago. The one that none of you have read. 

Oh, you did read it, did you? Congratulations! That puts you in quite the elite club. Want to know how to get into the club's super-secret, cool kids only treehouse? Click on the embedded video in that post. If you're quick you could be the fifth person ever to see it!

I expect people not to watch the videos. Hardly anyone ever does. I can see how many times they've been viewed on YouTube (And yes, I checked, and watching it on the blog does increment the YouTube counter.). The last one I did before this, for the post Some Puppy Walking,  has been watched sixteen times. The post itself has over three hundred views so you do the math...

Three hundred views used to be bang on average for a post here, after it's been up for a week or more. So far, only forty-five people have viewed Wednesday's post, according to the little widget next to it in the post list in Blogger. 

That's about the only stat I ever pay any attention to these days. I got very fed up with the unnecessary complexity of Google Analytics, so when they revamped it and you had to jump through a load of technical hoops to have your website included in the new version, I opted not to bother.

I also stopped looking at Blogger's own stats ages ago because they don't seem to filter out bots so they're always ludicrously inflated. Even the page-view number that I do still look at, mostly because it's always right there in front of me, is just the same number from the main stats, so I don't take it too seriously either.

Still, even bad stats are useful if they're consistent in their badness. Any sudden change means something must have happened. And there has been one heck of a big change just recently.

Before Blaugust, that page view figure bobbled fairly consistently somewhere between 250 and 400 over the first seven days or so after the post published. Most posts stop picking up views after that although there can obviously be spikes at any time.

At this point, you're probably expecting me to say page views went up during Blaugust. That's always been the conventional wisdom and with this year having a record number of participants and with me consistently linking every post in the Blaugust Discord, it's more than reasonable to imagine it would hold true. 

It didn't, though, or not for me. Most years I see little or no uptick in views from Blaugust and this year was much the same. Until the last week, that is. 

From the 25th of August, page views almost doubled, averaging around seven or eight hundred. That bump carried on long after Blaugust ended and indeed became more pronounced as September went on, with quite a few posts hitting four figures, topping out at just over two thousand.

Why? No idea. I rarely have any clue why these things happen. And equally, I have no explanation for why they stop, which seems to be what's happened now. Only this time the drop is as spectacular as the rise was.

Generally, any post I put up gets most of its views in the first 24-48 hours, as you'd expect. I haven't been keeping track but I'm fairly sure back when they were finishing up with  three or four hundred views, they'd have seen half of those in the first two or three days.

The last two posts have so far managed 45 views in two days and 34 in 24 hours respectively. That doesn't seem normal to me, which is why this morning I started fiddling about in Google's stat cupboards to see if I could figure out what was going on.

I'll put you out of your suspense now. I did not figure out what was going on. I have no way of knowing whether regular readers have suddenly found better things to do or if Google has started tallying things differently. I'll just wait for it to change again, which it will.

I did, however, discover some other new and quite interesting things while I was rummaging and that's how this post came about.

Firstly, I'll say that Google Search Console is a huge improvement on Analytics for the casual user. If you have a Blogger blog, I'd recommend giving it a look. It's much clearer, far easier to understand, and best of all it explains what the stats mean. You can set filters and use them to dig out some quite useful detail without a great deal of trouble.

I particularly liked the new Insights Report, which gives you a very clear indication of which of your posts are trending up or down and enough granularity to take a shot at figuring out why. And that's where I noticed something very odd.

It wasn't that there'd been a big spike in search requests for my post on housing in Throne and Liberty, which I put up just under a year ago. T&L has just added housing so obviously people are googling for information on it, none of which they're going to find here.

It's harder to explain why there's been a surge of interest in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt. If anything new is happening there, I've missed it. Two of my posts about it do turn up on the first page of Google Search results though, so I guess if anyone is still interested, they might well give me a look.

The one that really set me thinking, though, was the sudden interest in this post from just over a year ago. 

That's a "What I've Been Listening To Lately" post. No-one reads those. Okay, some people do, but clearly that series isn't going to come up in a general search very often. Yes, they do often have the names of famous people in the body of the post but hardly ever in the title and let's be realistic here - even putting Taylor Swift's name in the title of your blog post is not going to get you onto the first hundred pages on a search result, is it? I mean, there's a lot of competition there...

In the case of this particular post, I didn't mention Taylor Swift in the title (Although A$AP Rocky's Taylor Swif is one the featured tunes.) or anyone even close to being that famous. I did, as it happens, mention the name of a Woody Allen movie that doesn't even feature in the post at all, but that's not what people were searching for.

They were looking for a band called X-Cetra, a bunch of Californian tweenage girls who made a very odd album by the name of Stardust a couple of decades ago. I said in the post that X-Cetra didn't even have a Wikipedia page. I just checked and they still don't. I guess that explains why someone would bother to click through to a blog that mentioned them.

And they have. Not in the kind of numbers that click through to check on posts about clothes or housing in Once Human, which seem to be by far the biggest draw here over the last twelve months, but in numbers that feel statistically significant, especially since most of them appear to have happened not when I put the post up last year but in this last month.

 

In fact, my top search query for September is "X-cetra stardust" and two more variations of the phrase are also in the top ten. Altogether, there were 829 searches for X-Cetra Stardust in the last 28 days and twenty-nine people clicked through to look at the page in full. It may not sound like a great conversion rate but in comparison, of more than a thousand inquiries about housing in Throne & Liberty, only nine people clicked.

What's even more interesting is that, of the 39 clicks from search the post has ever received, 38 of them were in the last month. There was a huge spike (Seven clicks!) on 3 September and it's been ticking away ever since.

If there's been any general news about the album or the band, I'm not aware of it. Google Trends does confirm a huge spike of interest on 3 September but a general search finds nothing special.

Enter Blaugustian Calishat with their invaluable selection of search refinement tools. With the inestimable Back That Ask Up utility I was able to narrow my search down to the exact moment of the spike and find the reason for it - an article in Rolling Stone entitled "Four Best Friends Made an Album as Kids. 25 Years Later, It’s a Cult Classic"

It's a big article with lots of new information. It even links to a "Blogspot User", sadly not me. I bet they got some page views that day. I just got the spill-over. 

But wait. There's more. 

Unsurprisingly, given the paucity of information on the band, my post does appear on the first page of Google search results, but you have to scroll down a fair way. The thing that amazed me and led to this post, though, is what I saw at the top of the page. 

It's in the image up there at the head of this post. That's a screenshot of the top of a Google search page, the bit I rarely look at. I almost always scroll straight past all of the featured links and the AI summaries to the point where the old school listings start and go from there.

In the middle, with the eye-catching thumbnail of Teri Gender Bender from Le Butcherettes, is a link to my post. Why I'm getting that prime spot rather than, say, the Rolling Stone article, I have no idea but I'll happily take it. 

That big panel across the top of the results seems only to appear if you search for specific entity by name. It works for bands, albums, movies, actors, games... As soon as you add any detail to the query, though, it vanishes. Has it always been there? I guess I hardly ever search for anything purely by name so I would very rarely see it. 

I might have to  pay it more attention, now I discover that one of my posts has been featured that way. I guess it proves you don't have to pay to get featured on Google search, at least.

And after all that, I guess my extremely late for Blaugust advice on how to get more page views and clicks would have to be write about very obscure things no-one else is covering or clothes and housing in online games. That's what seems to be working for me, anyway.

For a given value of "working", that is. A very, very tiny one.