generally like to avoid spending too much time looking at stats, but there are some things that WordPress likes to shove in your face whether you like it or not, including showing you the number of views, likes, and comments per post on your list of posts. Something that has always baffled me is the blog viewer but non-interacter, and I’m hoping maybe you can help to solve the mystery.
So, what do I mean by this mysterious group of people? I’m not talking about the do-nothing followers that Paula of Light Motifs II recently described; those are the people that follow your blog and then you never see anything from them ever again. I’m talking about the gap between the number of views of a post and the number of interactions in the form of likes or comments. In this context, I’m paying more attention to likes, not because they matter more (they don’t), but because it’s the easiest form of interacting with a post.
To pick a nice even number, let’s say I did a post a couple of days ago that got 100 views. Based on my blog’s usual pattern, depending on the post, that might get as few as 30 likes or, in rare cases, as many as 50. Usually it would be around 35-40 likes per 100 views. So who are all of those other viewers?
I don’t think I get a ton of meaningless likes on my posts from people who haven’t even looked at the post, but those people would have the opposite effect of the viewer but non-interacter. Having a few of those would make the percentage of likes per views even lower. One a post with 100 views and 30 likes, perhaps only 25 of those likes came from people who actually registered as a view. That means that 75 people viewed and vanished. It’s like the blogging Bermuda Triangle.
This puzzles me not because the number of likes matters, but because I just can’t figure out who all of these people are.
There are assorted reasons why someone might open a post and not like, e.g. they opened it by accident, they didn’t finish it, they didn’t like what they read, the like button wasn’t working, they commented but didn’t like, etc. Those are all very good reasons to have some views without any interaction.
There are also non-Wordpress viewers, but my posts that are a day or two old don’t get many non-WP viewers, so I don’t think that particular factor accounts for much of this particular blogging Bermuda Triangle of mine.
In my mind, those assorted factors could very reasonably account for maybe 40% of the number of views.
But I can’t figure out what’s going on that 2/3 of people who view my brand new posts don’t interact at all. Who are all of these people? The number of likes doesn’t matter, but it’s a mystery I haven’t been able to solve, and I like to solve mysteries.
So I’m curious, does your blog have a big proportion of viewers who don’t interact? Do you have any thoughts on what accounts for the mysterious non-interacters?
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