Does my site's analytics change how I write?

In the Overcommitted community Discord, we've had some discussion recently about using analytics on our sites.

In response to a question about how I use it, and whether it changes my behaviour, I thought I may as well get another blog post out of it!

You may also be interested in reading my annual "site in review" posts, which over the years go into some of the specifics, and might be an interesting point-in-time view into my thinking.

What do I use for analytics?

For 10 years (this coming November), I've been self-hosting Matomo (née Piwik) for my personal websites and side projects.

I've found it to be really great for what I've needed it for, giving me good insight into the analytics I'm recording and a good level of privacy protection.

As I've been using Matomo (with the same initial database) it means I've got 10 years of data and insights into traffic to my site over the years.

I'd originally chosen Matomo as I wanted to avoid Google Analytics - trying to reduce Google's monoculture, in the small way I oculd - while also being in a very self-host-all-the-things time of my life.

I don't regret it, and I always recommend it to others too - it's great software, and self-hosting has been really quite straightforward, and I've had no issues on a ~€4/mo with the traffic I've been seeing, and for those who don't want the bother, there's a business-focussed Cloud offering too.

What data do I keep an eye on?

Over the years, the main thing I'm interested in is "is anyone reading and/or talking about a post of mine right now?"

I used to have a window with Matomo's "Real-time" view up n my desktop, so I could always see what's going on.

But as noted in last year's "site in review" post I now have a fancy new TUI app that gives me the ability to see what's happening live:

I'm generally not too interested in metadata like devices folks are reading on or countries they're from, aside from when there's a significantly high AWS bill.

I'm also very interested to see who's referring folks to my site (where that's available from requests), as it either highlights cases where a post of mine appears in a newsletter or on social media, allows me to see "oh, my old colleagues at Capital One are looking at one of my old PRs" or a sign that I'm doing well in the search rankings for the page, if there's a high amount of traffic from search engines.

(And where possible, I'll send a Webmention from the page that linked to me, where I can find it)

What types of blog posts do I write?

Regular readers of the blog will know I have three types of blog post:

1. Blogumentation: a blog post as a form of documentation, which are written for me, but it's good if someone else gets the benefit
2. Week Notes, which are primarily for me to process the week
3. Blog posts I write for others to read

It's likely that you'll be able to tell the difference when you're reading my posts - a blog post for others isn't tagged under blogumentation or week-notes, and is also probably going to read like I've spent a bit more time writing it and considering what I want the reader to get out of it.

What impact do my analytics make on my writing?

I don't think my site's analytics really make that much of a difference.

I do love watching my stats going by, trying to work out where on the Internet I'm being talked about if a post sees a sudden increase, and love the dopamine of a spike in traffic.

I enjoy having others read my content, and it's cool that there are folks that are reading and engaging with my content, and there's a group of folks who are regularly cross-posting content of mine to other sites like Hacker News (who aren't me 😝).

I used to wonder if I should write about posts that I've been getting organic search traffic for, but the post they've landed on isn't quite what they're looking for, but I only have so much time in this world, and my ADHD can make it hard to do things like that.

I don't think my use of analytics will change over time, and that they're more of a "huh, that's cool" rather than a leading driver in what and how I write - I know generally how and what I'm wanting to write.