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Where do Your Readers Come From?

Posted By Darren Rowse 27th of May 2007 Miscellaneous Blog Tips 0 Comments

I’ve been having some fun with Google Analytics tonight – particularly in looking at where readers of my blogs come from geographically. It’s not something that I’ve done for a while and the stats for ProBlogger have changed quite a bit.

Previously when I did this I had a fair spread of readers between Europe and the USA – however there’s been a shift (a significant one).

More and more ProBlogger readers are now coming from the US. US readers are coming to ProBlogger in numbers six times as high as any other country. The UK, Canada, India, Australia, Malaysia, Germany and Singapore also feature in the top 10.

Here’s the global map (the darker green represents where the numbers are):

Picture 1-20

Zooming in on the USA thee are are few states that are more highly represented with California, New York State and Texas being more highly represented as follows:

Picture 2-12

Interestingly in ‘city’ view it’s New York City which is the most represented with Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington coming in next. Worldwide – London actually ranks between NYC and LA with Sydney, Toronto, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne and Singapore also featuring reasonably highly.

Picture 3-18

I’m not sure how I might use this information to improve my blog (although it does give some hints as to where any future events and meetups might make sense) however it’s a fun exercise and is quite energizing to do.

Where do your readers come from? Do you tailor your blogging in any way to people in different parts of the world?

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Well said! I’ve been pretty lucky so far when it comes to negative comments,

  2. Its kind of same for me too. I get most of my traffic from US. About targeting not sure. This information be useful for localized blog who work on different section of communities.At the max one can do , try giving little bit more news on US side which can fit into the niche too.

  3. That’s pretty interesting — my US map looks about the same with most of my readers from California, then Texas, then New York, then Florida. As of now, I don’t tailor the blog to any particular geographic location. Though it might be useful information if I decide to get together with some of my readers for a group outing to go take some photos.

  4. I find this subject fascinating!
    I’m in the UK and my top two countries are:
    USA 36%
    UK 25%

    What always amazes me though is the number of countries I have had visitors from. At the moment this is 136 countries and, I have to admit, that I’d have difficulty placing some of these on a map.

    I suppose it just illustrates the potential for anything that can be marketed worldwide.

    Mike.

  5. I don’t really look at my visitors’ map geographically, but since you brought it up, most of my visitors come from the US. (and I’m from Canada.) I use mostly Canadian grammar and spelling…. I wonder if I should change?

  6. I just took a look at my traffic stats and they’re nearly identical to yours. Rigged?

  7. :-) On the other hand, you might try not writing important posts aimed at the U.S. on the Memorial Day weekend or July 4th weekend. It would be interesting to track readership geographically during national holidays.

    For example I suspect that every Canadian that could be at the cottage last weekend (Victoria Day) was there and to heck with blogs. Pass the beer, eh.

    Doug

  8. I guess you could customise your English based on whether the majority of your audience uses British English or American English, although I find many authors stick with their local flavour for ease of use. The languages are so similar anyway I don’t consider it to be an issue when blogging.

    – Martin Reed

  9. In my blog, readers are mostly from USA, UK and Australiain that order. Europe accounts for less.

    Why can’t more Europeans read tech blogs? Or is it that they read only those bloody politics-celebrity gossips blogs?

    Change my style according to the demographics of my readers? Never in a million years – for all I know, it could change in days.

    Yes, it would be useful to know the stats for meet ups or even country-wide contests.

  10. I don’t know if knowing where your ‘readers’ are coming from might help (for meetups or other community building efforts) unless we can differentiate between regular readers and readers from Google searches.

    Can we have a location map of readers who have visited our blog say, at least 10 times in the past month? They might be considered as regular readers.

  11. My blog is focused on pubs in the UK. Since I only blog about pubs that I visit, that means that I visit many pubs near where I live in Leeds. I only have about 10 or so regular readers and the rest of my traffic comes from search engines.

    Therefore, as I’d expect, over 70% of visitors are from the UK. Interestingly though, the city view shows a broad UK-wide spread of cities, with London in first place and Leeds in second.

    I wonder though whether this is more telling the UK’s infrastructure. I know from my job that most major network hubs are in London, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Edinburgh. This pattern matches what I see in my blog. Interesting; ;-)

  12. I think what you are finding with the US is the cities that are most prominent are the ones with the most diverse culture also.

  13. Man, I am loving the new Google Analytics interface and reporting options!

    80% of 2Dolphins traffic comes from the Americas, with more than 94% coming from the U.S. Of that, 24% comes from myhome state, Texas, and nearly 12% comes from California – so our results are the inverse of Brian’s. Interestingly, nearly 42% of the Texas traffic is from my own region – although none of our local-area slacker friends ever seem to keep up with our website happenings.

    We don’t intentionally tailor our blog to any specific demographic or geographic segment, although there are ocassional posts that are more relevant to those in my city or region.

  14. Hi my traffic comes mainly from USA but we did not intentionally write to attract people from that country.

    We are from Singapore and got a website to dedicate it to Law of Attraction. This stuff can work in anyone’s life regardless of country. Thus, we really want to spread the conciousness of law of attraction across the globe via http://www.secretofunlimitedprosperity.com

    I guess getting visitors from overseas cheer us up because it is really fun and exicting to grow our business out of singapore

    Cheers
    Karen

  15. I could be wrong – assuming it originates the network information from the ISP at the deepest iteration that it can reach / has knowledge of, it may just be representing the major service providers in the given area which would account for similarities in traffic concentration?

    Given that several international ISPs also route through the states these days, the statistics could be skewed to a degree. I’ve had several occasions where I’ve been testing pre-production sites that were hooked up to analytics and had the hits register from halfway around the world, depending on how much travel I had in the internal network before it broke out to the public side of the web.

    Re,

    Tomo.

  16. I find that nearly all of my traffic comes from the UK. I presume that having a .co.uk domain has a large effect on this as 92% of my traffic come from search engines.

    I do get a few visitors from the US, with the majority coming from LA. I presume this is because they’re thinking about making a film of my blog. Seem logical…

  17. Hey im from india..
    my site’s 50% traffic from US,12% from UK,8.5% from India and rest others . i didnt make m stats progam to report except top 3.. :)

    and my site’s not tailored for some regions either because there are only few topics like polictics and such things which can be country / region specific .and my site isnt one among that…
    :)

  18. My recent traffic is 92% from the U.S., then 2% from Canada, 2% from the United Kingdom, 1% from Australia, and then fractional percentages from other countries. Even though most of the traffic is from the U.S., I do try to be sensitive to the fact that people from other countries are reading along. For example, if I mention a city that would be recognizable to most in the U.S., I try to include the name of the state as well for those from other countries. When I blogged on the National Day of Prayer in May, I was careful to to clarify that this was the National day of Prayer for the U.S., not assuming that all my readers were U.S. residents. I think it is good just to be aware of the diversity of your readers, so that you don’t talk past some in the process.

  19. I’ve always been interested in these kind of stats but I’ve never found a logical application for them.

  20. I don’t think you have to tailor your blog to match the demographics, but it would be nice to give a shout out to your highest geographical readership market.

    We use Google analytics to research what print and local media outlets to use. Our company is between two major metro areas (Milwaukee and Green Bay). If town a is visiting our blog, we are going to market to town a. Everyone has a limited marketing budget and no one wants to shoot in the dark. Analytics is an awesome tool for small business owners.

    If a blogger finds that their blog is doing really well in a certain locale, I think it would be prudent to find out why their blog niche succeeds in that market and to try and capitalize on the information.

  21. 80% from the Americas. This is also reflected in feed traffic! I’ve increasingly tailored my content to reflect this readership.

  22. Using my basic stat counter service, I’ve noticed I have readers from all over the world – but a majority reside in the US. To that effect, I try to tailor my posts so that anyone in the world can read, understand and enjoy what I write.

    By the way, I’m one of your US readers – from the Chicago area! I read this blog on a regular basis and have learned a lot from it. Not only that, but it’s always fun to read. Thank you! Keep up the good work!!!

  23. Oh look, there I am on the map! Who else is in Spokane?

    My blog has always had a “Great Northwest” regional flavor and, as expected, a majority (74%) from the US. Quite a few Canadians can also identify with the climate here, but I always have to remind myself that you people in the Southern hemisphere are doing the opposite thing seasonally.

  24. Darren, you seem to totally OWN Greenland. ;-)

  25. I think Martin has a good point: if you blog in English, do you use US English or British English? I come from New Zealand so normally I would write/type in British English (for example, colour instead of color). But the majority of my visitors are from the US so I blog in US English. I don’t know if anyone really notices or cares though, it just seemed to be standard.

  26. 43% Australian, 40% US, the rest split between europe and canada.

    The Germans though, spend a near 10 min average on my site?!

    Ach du liebe!

  27. I’m no guru on this but maybe the high readership levels from California, New York and Texas represent head offices of major ISP’s and the analytics is reporting this cause that’s as much information as it provides.

    For example if a major ISP has registered it’s IP blocks to it’s head office in Los Angeles then analytics won’t know any better that those IP’s are in LA even though they provide a national service.

    I’ve noticed that when I get geo based advertising it’s targeted for a suburb in Melbourne, even though I’m in Hobart and my ISP is Adelaide based.

  28. Who visit this my Blog ?

    http://globalgold.blogspot.com/2006/07/off-topic-who-visit-this-blog.html

    More and more firefox users lately . keep your site in check with firefox.

  29. As several have pointed out, some of these stats can be skewed by regional ISP gateways, but in general they seem very accurate.

    I also have notices my mainland Asia and Australian traffic is down quite a bit and my US/Canadian has increased. As several have found, my Asian and EU traffic spends a lot more time on site, though, so thye may be of higher value in that sense.

    I would never try difficult and artificial things like changing my “brand” of English … but looking at the new stats in response to this article I am going to schedule a few Australian-oriented posts … Australia is a hotbed of development and use for GPS tracking and perhaps they have dropped off because I wasn’t paying enough attention there.

  30. Most of my traffic comes from the same areas as yours, although on a much smaller scale :) I’m not sure if it reflects people’s interests as much as it does penetration of broadband and the internet in general.

    I live in the SF bay area, so it’s easy for me to forget sometimes that there are whole areas of this country that are only now being introduced to PC’s.

  31. Most of my readers come from Europe, with an emphasiz on Balkans cause blog is in Serbian and target group is much smaller…

  32. I love this feature on Analytics. Most of my visitors come from the U.S. and Australia, but I think bloggers with content that is written for readers in certain areas really gain a benefit from it. Like other political bloggers, you want readers to come from your own country because that’s where a lot of the stuff is orientated but I’m also trying to get readers from the Middle-East as I talk about the wars there a lot.

  33. I can vouch for at least one skewed statistic. I’m located between the central and southwestern part of Arkansas, USA. My ISP shows up on Statcounter as being from Texarkana, TX which is right on the TX/AR stateline in the corner of southwest Arkansas. Some would consider my location remote, and my cable access IS right on the edge of the line of availability locally.

    If you zoom in on the map of Arkansas you’ll see the central and northwestern areas of AR represented with the orange dots. Those areas are the locations of the major cities in AR. My ISP isn’t represented by any of the orange dots in TX, either. There again, the dots represent the heavily populated areas of TX.

    (Sorry, worked in accounting too many yrs…details grab me)

  34. You meant to say Kuala Lumpur when you typed it as “Luala Lumpur” in the 6th para?

  35. Hi from Norway :-)

  36. My readers are from all over the world. A total of 40+++% comes from my home country, another 40+++% from the United States, the the remaining 20% comes from the rest of the planet. It is very interesting when i look at such stats, imagining what post they would like to read next, or the things they love to do. Are they hard core bloggers like some? or casual writers? I enjoy reading your posts, keep it up! More power! Mabuhay!

  37. Same thing same graph with slight difference is true with all blogs and sights that are being written on non regional content.

    And rest of the world doesn’t read english blogs,chinese ,japanese and russians prefer their own language.And us will be at the top of the top ten list of many of us.Once again a good cocept darren,i love this one…!

  38. I write a Canadian personal financial blog, and most of my traffics are from Canada. I don’t mind getting more traffics from US though :P

  39. I’m a recovering statsaholic, so I better not get too much into the stats debate.

  40. tuning in from Guyana. gracias

  41. I haven’t figured out the Google Analytics for my site yet (gasp! I know). I have been working with (techies at) http://www.fetchrex.com, a Digg-type site for non-techies, and they are all about the Analytics and this kind of stuff, which has been really interesting & educational for me, especially how you can gauge response to different topics in different parts of the U.S. and around the world.

  42. Interestingly my stats for 2 of my other blogs on Google Analytics are similar to other Australian blogs – mostly American.
    However when I check Webaliser there is a difference of over 10% in all countries.
    Which do you believe?
    Does it matter?

    I too had been checking Google stats today and was wondering if it would be worthwhile posting to catch various time zones around the world. That is, just before a peak is shown in the hits.
    Would this be any advantage? Anyone know?

    The other thing I noticed was that the Google ‘bounce’ rate was highest in countries that did not have English as native language. I am working on this to plugin translator software.

    Robin

  43. Surprisingly, most of my readers are coming from exactly where my internet connection is.

    Translation: My blog sucks and nobody is reading it but me. On the bright side, though, I feel I have the most interesting readership around, me.

  44. The map overlay is interesting.

    I just started this fairly focused regional Blog, and am surprised by how much time visitors who have stumbled into my site actually spend here.

    Also, I’m surprised to see my area fairly well represented on your map ( We’re in that smear east of Cleveland)… must be my visits showing up fairly frequently.

  45. I think it would depend on how attractive the stranger was. If it was a 10 I would definitely kiss. :)

  46. Good idea, I looked at the same before this post but it is a good idea. I get a lot from Australia (but I do blog about the afl among other things)…

    In your last points you asked if we tailor our posts to our audience geographically. What would be some ideas?? Maybe you could explain deeper in a post in the near future???

    Thanks

  47. yeah! Malaysia in in the Top 10. Malaysia Boleh!!!

  48. […] topic bought by Problogger yesterday, I was playing with google analytics but I have no idea that I can blog this.. lol… […]

  49. I try to make sure the financial information I provide is for the majority of my readers…most of which are from the US, but some are from other parts of the world.

  50. Most of my blog readers come from US. Maybe because THE SECRET and Law of Attraction is a big thing there.

    But I am from Singapore!

    But it makes it interesting and I must start using Google Analytics for my WordPress blog. Only question is… where do I place the Analytics Code?

    Abundance Always.

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