Revisiting the Web Analytics Rabbit Hole
A little over a year ago, I removed all analytics from this site because it was sending me down a rabbit hole that I didn’t like. Here’s an update.
If you haven’t read the previous post, the TL;DR is that I kept going down this rabbit hole where I was never satisfied with the performance of my content.
I’d read about all these bloggers that have post after post go viral and it felt like a real kick in the nuts.
So I took a step back and got some perspective. When I first started this blog, I wanted 100 views/month. Then I wanted 1000. Back when I killed off the analytics, I was getting 10s of thousands every month.
But I still wasn’t happy.
Removing analytics
So in June 2021, I removed all the web stats from this site. We’re now a year on and I’m so happy I did it.
I’m blissfully unaware of how many people visit this blog. It may have grown, it may have significantly reduced. I don’t know.
But I do know this; I still get lots of great engagement from the content I produce thanks to the reply by email button on the bottom of this and every other post.
If I think back to when I started this blog, the whole point behind it was for me to share my ideas with others, and learn from them too. Pretty much every post I publish now gets at least a handful of emails in response. Some want to ask for more detail on a point I’ve made. Others want to make a recommendation or provide some advice following a question I’ve asked.
The measure of success here is for me to establish. I wanted engagement and I’ve got it. This is exactly why I started blogging. I don’t need an analytics program to tell me if my blog is doing well.
If you’re thinking about removing analytics from your site, I’d implore you to do it. It’s worked out really well for me. Plus, there’s less JavaScript moving around the web then too!
Want more?
So you've read this post and you're still not satisfied? Ok then, here's some other stuff for you to do: