Data, Analytics, and Subscriptions

I had, very early on, think, 20+ years back, paid close attention to website analytics. At that time, the pre-astrofish.net column, just Fishing Guide to the Stars was a Monday column, and by 1995–1996, it was easily garnering 10K ”hits" – and most traffic for that Austin-based server-farm – on a Monday morning.

Every Monday.

I recall sifting though log files to see what the count was. In part, the high volume was due to a relatively heavy graphic interface, new in 1995, and, in part, it was a Monday Horoscope column that wasn’t associated with any large, corporate hierarchy.

Old Austin.

Part of the technical nightmare was that the column was broken down into discrete sign-by-sign files. Labor intensive when coding by hand. 12 times as many files that can have errors. 13, as there was an intro. 13 times as likely to have mistake repeated and propogated throughout the known universe.

I watched, that was before it was convenient to mine data, I watched what happened. Scorpio was always the second-most read horoscope. Weird.

By the turn of the millennia, I moved to a Thursday publication date, originally with an eye towards print publication, which, oddly enough, never happened, as I run too long. And weird, I am a bit too odd for some.

I have a basic analytics package running in the background even now, but I’ve found that it doesn’t do much for me. There’s not much valuable data there.

When I post something that resonates? In their words.

Data, Analytics, and Subscriptions

A client was getting, relatively speaking, tons of traffic from a years-old post about a particular health-related topic. A single post got all the attention. My sugestion was to discreetly advertise on that particular page, maybe a health-related item. What the data suggests on my sites, though, is that the current material is what is most popular. Oddly enough, this week’s horoscope is most popular.

That’s what the data suggests.