10 million page views!

Making A Mark achieved 10 million page views at 2.15pm this afternoon! I've been looking forward to this for a while.....

I was slightly slow in catching up with the event so this is what it looked like when I took a screendump at 2.20pm.

The page view count (courtesy of Blogger in the side column of Making A Mark
followed by the Visitor Count generated by Statcounter

Blogger has only been counting page views since 2008 whereas this blog is coming up to 11 years old having been started at the end of 2005 and went public in January 2006

That means that there's actually around 2 years worth of page views somewhere!

What's the difference between page views counted by Blogger and Google Analytics?

I found out the difference between page views as counted by Blogger and page views as counted by Google Analytics yesterday.

• Apparently Google literally counts page views - and as we know a view of a blog on one page may have several blog posts. 
• Whereas Blogger counts the views for every blog post - as if every post was its own page - which of course it is since it has a unique URL.  

That's why I'm minded to say that the Blogger count to my mind is more accurate as it's counting visits to blog posts - by URL. Only those who come to the domain name page get treated as one visit even if they read every post on that home page!!!

Blogger also counts your own page views unless you turn them off as I do.

Statcounter seems to come between the two - but has a different length of time for how long the cookie stays before a visit from the same person counts as a repeat visit.

The geographical dimension

Of course things have also got complicated due to the fact that Blogger now uses geographical endings for all Blogger blogs on the basis that this allows them to cater for different requirements of the laws in every country. I've never quite got that one worked out - however I am totally convinced that Google Analytics does not count all page views properly when a blog is read globally.

The importance of your archive

The other interesting thing about page views is that if you have a lot of blog posts as I do (this is the 3,183rd!) about niche topics then you continue to generate traffic for that post long after you wrote it - via search traffic. (If you get your titles and meta description right!)

That's one of the reasons why the traffic to my blog is remaining pretty steady despite the fact I'm not writing as many posts.

The stats from the stats page for Making A Mark on Blogger!

In fact, you could day that the 10,000,000 page views are down to one of the things I learned very early on - which was the importance of making your archive accessible 

I commented to Alyson Stanfield earlier this year that...

I thank the day I read the article by Jakob Neilsen in which he pointed out that your assets (and your traffic) are in your Archives and you just need to find new ways of unlocking them for others!

[I think it was this particular Alertbox - in which he highlighted the statistical verification of making Archives accessible]

Of course - I guess you also have to have content that people think is worth reading! ;)