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Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Not measuring up


met·rics
noun
1. the use or study of poetic meters; prosody.
2. a method of measuring something, or the results obtained from this. "the report provides various metrics at the class and method level"
I check my blog stats more regularly than I post on my blog. It's a bit like cutting open a chicken and staring at the entrails in hopes there will be some epiphany there. But all I see are chicken guts.

Now granted I rely on the stats Blogger.com provides for free. So I shouldn't look a guest chicken in the entrails. But Blogger tells me I have had 219 page views on Friday, but only 41 posts were visited. So am I to assume 178 visited and had no interest in actually reading anything.

I still suspect that many of the disappointed visitors didn't actually visit any pages were somehow lured from the slew of Russian sites shown in my traffic sources metrics. But according to Blogger, only 32 have come from those sites.


And adding insult to injury, Statcounter.com tells me there were only six visitors to my page during the same time. But then again Statcounter.com only seems to register visits by Google-bots and "next blog" riff raff.  So it is basically useless.

Metrics are a mystery to me.  For that matter, so is prosody. But considering how I feel about poetry, that shouldn't be a stretch. I am inundated with buzz words like "engagement rate," "earned impressions" and "click-thru's."  It's all a load of bull pukey. As far as I'm concerned that only real way to measure whether someone has actually read anything on your blog is for them to comment or somehow indicate they like it (which in most cases is zero).

In the good old days you could measure your engagement and impressions by the number of books you sold and how many people asked you to sign them.

Not that I would know what that feels like. I missed that sweet spot for being a great American novelist. One must first write a book to accomplish that and then it has to be published. I've never been one for details.

I can't wait to post this and check my metrics. But I get the impression I will be disappointed.


3 comments:

Helen Baggott said...

I'm here!

Why not write a book based on your blog? Let's face it, it's new material. I'm the only one who's read it... some of it... bits of it... the odd sentence here and there.

Time said...

I did start compiling a "Best of Dizgraceland?" anthology on Blurb.com. But it got a bit tedious and the final book would have been too pricey. But I suppose I could try and create an e-book and try it out on Amazon.

As for you reading "the odd sentence here and there," well, it's all pretty much odd don't you think?

Helen Baggott said...

There's your title: Odd - I'd buy it. Or not. Might. Can't commit.