I have several websites, some of them blogs like this one. Yes, I know, I should have only one and concentrate on that. But things change. I’ve been blogging since before the name was invented, and much of it is still on this site, even though I’ve been pouring more of my writing-focused content into henrymelton.com and my Facebook fan page lately. Still, I’m not going to abandon Idle Thoughts anytime soon, since it’s my primary repository for non-writing content.
And so, when google alerts flagged me that for a couple of days running, I had a spike in readership here, I rushed to see what had happened. After all, the most recent posting was a couple of months old. If I had a new flux of readers, I wanted to know where they came from and why. At best, I could then find some way to reward them by providing more of what they came to see. At the least, I could become more aware of the site that referred them, visit there and see if we had common ground.
But it was a frustration. As you probably know, websites get a little snip of information that tells where a new arrival came from. I looked, and what I found was this:
From this, I can see that the number one source of referrals lately was from social-buttons. This is frustrating. It tells me nothing about where the site was, or the topic of conversation. It’s just the site that manages the link button. It’s like asking “where did the click come from?” and getting the answer “From the mouse button.” No useful information at all.