Can your Feedburner stats reveal habits of your readers that could help you make your blogging more effective at reaching them? Guest poster Max Pool finds out.
As we know FeedBurner counts can naturally fluctuate.
But what about when they fluctuate unnaturally? Can we find trends in our statistics? Interestingly, your FeedBurner stats can tell stories about your readers’ habits.
During the first few months of my first blog, I attempted to try and notice trends and patterns as seen below:
I immediately found 3 points of interest as highlighted on the chart.
- Readers were most active at the beginning and end of work weeks
- Weekend reading was minimal
- A new pattern during a holiday week
After finding some patterns in the charts, I started to hypothesize what caused this pattern to occur. Was it my posting frequency? Was I posting on the wrong days? I started to think about my personal feed reading habits and was able to produce some reasoning.
1. Start and end of week was most active
Most bloggers have been told that Mondays tend to be the best day for readers. It is not hard to imagine your readers, spread out with their coffee mug plowing through weekend feeds. The opposite holds equally as true, readers want to digest all of their feeds before they leave for the weekend.
2. Minimal weekend reading
This will not surprise anyone; people are away from their computers and are doing very little reading. The consistency between Saturday and Sunday is caused from the web-based readers reporting in and the exclusion of the on-demand readers.
3. New holiday pattern
The inverted ‘U’ comes from a recent American holiday – July 4th. Iexpected numbers to be down this week, so low counts were not surprising. I expected Wednesday, July 4th to be the slowest day, instead the opposite held true and a number of readers returned. I will post these next holidays and anxiously await to see the trends during Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
There are many reasons why readers unsubscribe, but remembering that external human factors are involved can help you rationalize fluctuating counts and react accordingly.
This is a guest post by Max Pool, a software engineer by day – aspiring SEO expert by night. More ideas can be found at his blog codesqueeze.com.
