I have been writing Omega Alpha | Open Access for 7 months now, starting at the end of November 2011. On February 25, 2012, WordPress.com launched an enhancement to blog statistics called “Views by Country.” This feature displays both a country listing (with country flag) and a map showing the views distribution for a given time period. Because it is today exactly four months since this feature was launched, I thought it would be interesting to take a cumulative look at my stats using this view. (This feature is unable to retrieve statistics prior to February 25.)
It is fascinating and actually a little amazing to see how far and wide (if not yet deep) my blog has been accessed in just four months time. Although I have had only about 5,000 views in this period (I have had just over 6,500 views over the life of the blog), I count 92 countries where at least one view has been logged! Of this total, 45 countries have had 10 or more views logged.
Wow! This is pretty remarkable. I want to thank you for your interest in Omega Alpha | Open Access. I hope you are finding the stories informative and encouraging toward the promotion of open access publishing in Religion and Theology. I welcome your comments.
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Does this only count views on the web-page, or does it include downloads of the whole post into an RSS reader, which is how I usually read it?
David,
Greetings. While I’m not exactly sure how RSS is handled, I believe this count is the actual page/post views–a link has to be clicked to the blog post or page–regardless of referral source. WordPress also provides stats on the pages/posts visited, and the counts sync-up with the country view.
WordPress stats are pretty impressive. I can see referral sources (search engine, Twitter, Facebook, other sites that link to the blog, etc.), click activity on the blog (links I embed in a post to some other site), search terms that were used to send someone to the blog, top posts and pages, comment counts, followers, etc. Document or file downloads from the blog, and search engine crawlers are not counted.
David, I just found this bit on the WordPress support site: “Someone reading your posts via a feed will not count towards your blog statistics. However, you still can view the number of syndicated views on each of your blog posts.”