It’s been almost 6 months since I killed all active analytics on my blogs. I scrubbed it of Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats. The only numbers I get now are passive and highly aggregated and anonymized, webserver logs automatically crunched by Urchin.
I don’t miss the detailed active analytics one bit. I still find out if anyone links to my stuff, through the WordPress Dashboard links widget. But I have no clue about how many people read my stuff, nor how many RSS subscribers there are.
And that’s (still) highly liberating. I can’t let myself play egocentric mind games with numbers. I can’t delude myself into believing this space is Important, or *cringe* **popular** because those things aren’t real, and don’t matter.
So now, it’s still just me. And, maybe, a few others out there somewhere. And I don’t think I could ever go back to the number OCD of active analytics. I’ve let go of meaningless statistics.
i feel you: there are an infinite number of stats you could track. the key is picking out a few with meaning. how many people visited on sunday from miami after 5 o’clock is probably not worthwhile.
how people find you, then what they do in time and bounce when they get there could be useful, even to a writer. especially to a writer.
from a San Diego public relations guy
No referrers? I assume you get that from the urchin logs. This is the key to me – analytics, when it comes to being a blogger, has NEVER been for me about scale. It’s always been about unearthing new connections. Trackbacks (which you presumably still get) are one piece, comment links another, the last for me being referrer logs.
the referrer lists in Urchin are too noisy to be of any use – too many spam factories listed in there. signal:noise is low.
I’ve always left trackbacks enabled (even when comments were disabled). I get so few of them that they really don’t do much. People generally don’t post things as blog posts anymore, but tweet instead. That was one thing I wanted to experiment with when the comments were disabled – would trackbacks change at all? nope. that kind of distributed blog conversation has basically vanished.