Re: Thanks for the Referrals

I do like looking at the referrals on my posts. Since I’m a tiny little blog, I don’t get much traffic from search engines. The main way people find my posts is when other people link to them on their own blogs. Now, I like to think that I’m a cool person, and by extension, that my website is cool. Therefore, people who put up links to it on their sites are probably cool too. It’s not a perfect heuristic, but good enough is good enough.

Yep, agreed. I use Fathom Analytics, and you can see my dashboard here and my privacy statement here. I find a lot of value in seeing which posts are being found organically so I can ensure the content is up to date.

For example, there has always been this dogmatic belief that web developers should design mobile-first. Using analytics, I can see that of the 1.5k people who visited my website in the last 30 days, only 205 were on their phones, and 1.2k were using a desktop. Yes, I still want the 205 people to have a good experience, so I ensure the site is responsive and looks good on mobile—but if those stats were reversed, I would certainly spend more time refining the mobile layout.

Additionally, I sign up for the webmaster tools for Google, Bing, etc., so I can see the keywords people are using to find my site. I'm not doing any sort of purposeful SEO junk, but it's a bit thrilling to be on the first page of the search results for certain phrases.

All that to say: I like seeing the analytics from my site and how people are finding it.