Who's There?

Who am I talking to, anyway?  Myself, for sure, and Future Rain, but also some friends and family that tell me they regularly read my posts (Hi Mom!), but are there people that regularly read my posts who I don't know?   Secret friends and silent readers who know the names of my chickens and what my compost looks like? Well, one of the fun thing about this blog is that there are ways to get hints about who is reading, if anyone.   

I started writing in this space almost two years ago, but it wasn't until July of 2013 that I became blog savvy enough to figure out how to use Google Analytics.  Google Analytics keeps track of all sorts of things about a website, which I haven't figured out, but I do know how to look at the audience overview page, which summarizes how many times someone looks at my blog, which they call a "session".  Since I've been tracking, this blog has had over four thousand sessions.  This includes every time someone clicks on one of my pages, even if they quickly realize it's stupid it's not what they were looking for, and they move on within a second.  It also keeps track of how many separate users visit the page.  So far, over thirteen hundred different people have clicked on my blog, and about sixty-nine percent of these people are returning visitors.  

Well, that might sound like there are lots of us here, and if I look at the map to see where all these users are, at a glance it even looks like some of us are sprinkled throughout the world.  But in reality, most of us are in the United States.  For example, twenty-eight folks in Australia have visited the blog, but if I look closely at the numbers, I can see that the average time they spent reading was about twelve seconds.  So, either Australians are speed readers, or my content is not gripping enough for the Australian audience.  They must have missed the post about the chicken feet, huh?

What I regularly glance at, is the number of users per day or per week in the last month.  What I come away with from a quick look, is that every week there are thirty or so folks checking my blog, and probably three of those are people who just wandered in.  I may not know who you are, but I know you are there!