27,000 Readers

I have been flying blind for over two years on a very important statistic.  That being my unique audience count.

I started out using TypePad's stats and quickly realized they weren't going to cut it.

I put Sitemeter on my blog and have been tracking pageviews and unique visits for a couple years now.

I put Feedburner on my feed and have been tracking "RSS circulation" since March 2004.

But the one stat that I've not been able to figure out is my unique visitor count.  Until now.

Last month, I put two new things on my blog.

The first is a Tacoda data tag.  I am now tracking my audience and looking at their behaviors on my blog and elsewhere on the web.  It's fascinating data and I will share it with all of you as soon as I figure out what it means myself.

The second is Google Analytics. Although I have been critical of this service and don't find it all that useful for my purposes, it does give me some new stats.

Both Tacoda and Google report that my unique web audience is 27,000 readers.  Google says 27,480 and Tacoda says 26,558.  So 27,000 it is.

I suppose some of my ~7,000 RSS readers overlap with that number and some don't.  So maybe my total audience is around 30,000. 

That's good to know. I'd like to thank all of you for reading and especially those who give back via comments, track backs, and private emails.  It's about the conversation after all.

Comments

[peter caputa]

Is Tacoda using that data to better targets ads based on your visitor's behavior?

You may want to share that with your visitors.

[Simon]

So you have a true readership that is larger than many (most?) newspapers. Congrats.

[Zoli Erdos]

The surprise (at least to me) in those numbers is that only 1/4 of your unique readers get the RSS feed.
I've had the assumption that the majority of regular blog readers do it via RSS - boy, was I wrong!

[jackson]

All my life, I have strived to be unique. If not using RSS keeps me there, then so be it.