When I started writing this blog I had a couple of different motivations.

First of all I wanted to keep a diary, for myself, but also for friends and family at home, to see what I am doing. And for practical reasons of not having to write the same emails over and over again with the summary of the day/week/month.

Then of course I somehow hoped it would interest other people, maybe inspire someone to do the same thing.

That’s why I have been pretty explicit about some stats and budget issues, even if at first I wasn’t sure to reveal them.

But then I though how much information that would have given me when I was planing my own trip, and how I sucked up the info from other blogs.

I also slowly learned to handle the blog’s IT issues better, and started ‘promoting’ it a bit, mostly on twitter, which gave some nice results in the visitor’s numbers. I have a bit over a thousand followers now, even though I don’t know how many people really follow me.

I have the simple counter at the end of each page, but I am not really sure what that actually counts.

My host provider gives me access to a whole lot more statistics, that I recently started to look into a bit more, and try to understand.

In general, as of 26 January 2015, I can say the following:

• on a given day, there are somewhere between 150 and 260 visits,
• adding up to about 2350 unique visitors a month,
• visiting a total of 5600 times (e.g. they come back again),
• seeing 31500 pages,
• creating 116000 hits,
• and downloading about 7.5 GB of data.

So that’s the current situation. It’s actually better than I ever thought.

I also have the stats for the full year of 2014. In general, over the year I gained more followers. That’s encouraging, rising from 1400 to over 2000 between January and December 2014.

However, there are also unusual highs and lows, with nearly double that figure. For example, May 2014 saw nearly 4000 unique visitors, and a low point of a mere 1850 unique visitors in November.

Between May and June I nearly ‘lost’ half of the visitors. Was Istanbul that more interesting than Tel Aviv? Did I stop tweeting and promoting?

I’d have to look into that. Maybe someone just posted a link to my blog on a different site that month, and boom!, I got more exposure….

What else is interesting?

• Identified by their IP address, I can see that the average visitor returned 2.74 times, and watched about 14 pages
• most popular days are Monday (everyone back in the office, I guess) and Saturday (catching up over your morning coffee…?)
• 80% of visitors leave the site within 30 seconds. I guess they just browse and this was not what they were looking for. Disney’s Let it go might cause a lot of that kind of traffic.
• The remaining 20% of visitors stay pretty long though, and split up pretty evenly: 5% up to 5 minutes, 5% up to 30 minutes, 5% up to an hour, and another 5% over an hour. That’s nice, maybe it’s the night owls that can’t sleep and read through my blog.

These figures exclude by the way the hits by Google’s search engines and the likes, bots and stuff. Those figures are roughly the same traffic as the real readers, but they can’t count.

In total, so far, the blog had 466.500 page views (those being a more accurate figure than the ‘hits’) and a bit over 100000 individual visits.

I hope to bring the page views to at least half a million, by the end of this trip. Help me spread the word 😉