Analytics and Personal Blogs
Which brings me to my defense of analytics and my own use of tinylytics.app. I don’t care about the number of “hits” my blog gets. Considering how many places I post my content and my own hope that RSS is how most people read my site, hits are almost certainly no more than directionally accurate about readership. What I do care about are referrers.
Without analytics on referrers, I’d never know these people were a part of my small circle of the internet in conversation with my writing. So for now, I’m all in on having analytics. It’s one of the few reliable ways to know that someone had written about your content. I still want people to respond on their platform of choice, and I don’t want to lose their voice or conversation.
For the past ten years, my mornings began with checking analytics. This daily dose of data often left me feeling either like shit or ecstatic. Thankfully, the platform I’m blogging on now doesn’t have built-in analytics. However, I can definitely understand Jason’s desire to track his traffic sources.