State of the Blog, March 2021

I'm a huge fan of stats. I mean, a HUGE fan. To be honest, the only reason I really want people to visit my blog is so that my stats change.  Kind of.  I mean, I also want to provide helpful content.  And I think the stats on the blog can be helpful if only to get a bit of insight into how I determine what's a valuable metric on a project.

Each month I'll post a series of metrics and the analysis in a "project summary" format.  The goal?  It's two fold:  1) I need to make sure I'm making the right decisions for this blog and 2) so that you can understand my rational on making decisions based upon statistics and how to present them in a meaningful way.  

In any case, here's the state of robtacey.com as of March 1st, 2021.

Site Metrics

Analysis

• The blog has only been posting content since 2021/02/16.  Page views and new users/month are based upon a partial month.  Based upon this info, it's likely that in 2021/03 the number of page views will reach the first Milestone of 250 page views/month.
• The site was only submitted to Google on 2021/02/25. Now that the site map has  been submitted it will likely receive more organic hits over time.
• Cost is determined by the AWS billing for S3 buckets tagged with robtacey.com.  At this time traffic is under the threshold for billing.  Ideally this will change.  Once the value reaches $10/month it will be necessary to review whether setting up a server will be economically viable.
• There may be additional metrics from Analytics and the Developer console that should be reported but at this point there's not enough data to generate meaningful stats.

Social Media Metrics

Analysis

• At this point it is too early to provide a baseline for social media exposure.
• I am focusing on Twitter as the primary social media channel for the robtacey.com blog.
• Linkedin may become a secondary channel but I would like more content to be available before posting content to Linkedin.

Future Metrics

• Once Google Adsense approves the site, advertising metrics will be important
• Once Google Developer console returns results there may be more data available to pos.

Summary

At this point, robtacey.com is exceptionally new and many of the metrics related to a site's success are not available.  The site will continue to generate traffic and statistics that will help determine if the direction I am taking is successful.  The recommendation at this point is to hold the course and continue to generate content and monitor the generated statistics.

Once the subscription form is added to the site, another topic will be added to the review detailing email marketing efforts - including new subscribers, unsubscribes, and engagement.

Sources

Statistics are generated from the following:

• Google Analytics
• Google Developer Console
• AWS Billing console
• Hoot Suite Dashboard