I jest.

I began In Which I with the aim of building an online portfolio/archive so potential freelance clients and employers could see that I was indeed capable of (a) stringing a sentence together, (b) writing about different subjects and (c) producing/collating content on a regular basis. I think I’ve succeeded in that. I update once a week on average, have an online record of my monthly walking column for the Battle Observer (I’m a bit behind uploading these, so expect a few more soon) and have published many of the articles I’ve written for the Hastings Independent.

I never expected to join any particular network of bloggers. I thought my subject matter would be too diverse and impersonal to appeal to any niche apart from the good old “people who know me” audience. After all, there aren’t that many people who are really into tea and wild camping and veg*n recipes and walking and local community news from Hastings, East Sussex. But in fact, it turns out the majority of my blog this year has been fairly outdoorsy and there’s a bunch of people who seem to enjoy that. Joining Alastair Humphreys’ Year of Microadventure challenge (wild camping) and coordinating my own themed monthly microadventure challenge (not just wild camping) has also meant that I’ve discovered loads of people who share similar interests. Bonus!

Back in October last year, I kind of implied that I'd give you some updates on the analytics front. Uhhh, better late than never? Sorry!

Since I started In Which I, 57% of my visitors (‘new users’ rather than ‘sessions’ for those familiar with Google Analytics) have been from the UK, 13% from the USA and 6% from Australia. I’m surprised there’s more USAn visitors than Australian, given I have a large family/friendship group in Australia. Perhaps this is partly to do with spam referrals - I had to filter a couple of USA locations early in 2015. But while the number of Australian visitors (new users) is quite a bit lower, the number of visits (sessions) from Australia and the USA are fairly similar, demonstrating that my trusty band of Australian friends is much more likely to visit this blog repeatedly.

In terms of referrals, 31% of visits (sessions) came via Twitter and 43% via Facebook (this includes m.facebook, lm.facebook and l.facebook traffic, for those playing at home). Other major referrers were this Alastair Humphreys post and Martin Black’s microadventure round-ups.

Now that I’m officially allowed to stay in the country (phew) - and now that summer is over - I’m beginning to look for a job. I’m planning to take a couple of months off from my walking column at the Battle Observer, so there might not be a November or December walk article. At the end of 2015, I will also finish the two year of microadventure challenges. But I’m not planning to stop blogging. I’m just hoping to take a step back and think about what I might want to do and write about next year.

So, is there something I’ve touched on before that you’d like me to revisit? Something you are especially interested in reading about? A new hobby you think I should take up (lacemaking, campanology, kitesurfing)? An old hobby you think I should knuckle down and do something with (music, creative writing, filmmaking, media criticism)? I can’t promise I’ll get around to it, but I promise I will consider your suggestions. Even the outlandish ones.

There is one other change afoot. Up until now, all of my post titles have been an extension of the blog name, so they can all be read as “In which I [x]” (e.g. In which I sleep in a ruin in Suffolk, In which I make room for nature with #30DaysWild, In which I forage for and cook with Alexanders). Did you notice? While it’s kind of fun, I’m growing tired of the formula. So, I hereby give myself permission to mix it up a bit, starting with this post.

In September, this blog had 182 sessions originating in the UK and 136 in Australia. Honourable mentions include the USA (28) and Canada (10). The only other countries with more than one session were Norway (3) and Vietnam (2) – I’m pretty sure I know who these people are! On average, people in the UK also spent a lot longer on the site than anyone else. About 70% of sessions used a laptop or desktop, while 23% were on mobiles (mostly iPhones) and 7% on tablets. A third of sessions used Safari, just under a quarter used Chrome or Firefox.

What am I going to do with this info?
I’m going to tell the 2% of you poor fools who are using Internet Explorer to try a better browser. Other than that, nothing. The content I’m posting is mainly focused on the UK, so it makes sense for British people to visit my site more. However, if you’re one of my Australian friends and you are annoyed that the UK is beating you at something, feel free to share my blog more frequently with your own Australian network. I won’t complain about the free publicity!

The majority of visits came to the blog via social media (67% of all visits). Over half of social media referrals were from Facebook, and a third from Twitter. I initially thought my non-social media referral stats were too high (10% of all traffic), but digging down I found the majority of these people came via the blogging platform Dreamwidth, with six coming via links in comments I made on other blogs. Only three people found my site through internet searches (this amuses me, since I do SEO for other websites as part of my freelance work).

What will I do about this?
It’s interesting that Facebook is responsible for so much traffic, because I’m far more active on Twitter. This might be because Facebook updates can have a longer life-span than tweets, especially if people continue to like or comment on a post. I’ll continue linking my updates on all sites, and I’ll see if these stats change next month (my last few updates were all but ignored on Facebook).

In terms of searches/SEO, free Weebly blogs have limited options. However, they’ve just given us more metadata fields (i.e. SEO title and description – yay!), so I will fill that in for all my posts and see if it makes a difference.

My most visited post is my first post about tea, followed by foraging in Norfolk then, almost equal third, un-beet-able chocolate mud muffins and the future of Hastings. The most popular landing pages (i.e. the page that someone first visits when they come to the site) are also tea and foraging in Norfolk, followed by Special K's brand identity and tiny houses. The days with the most traffic were, in order, Monday 1 September (Tea), Tuesday 23 September (Special K) and Tuesday 9 September (Norfolk). I suspect that the Special K post went almost as well as the tea and foraging posts because I hashtagged the bejeesus out of it on Twitter, where a few fellow social media marketers, brand nerds and comms people probably picked it up.

My least popular post was about The Secret of Kells. (What’s wrong with you ? Go and look at that cute movie!)

What does this mean for the future?
The most obvious pattern in these data is that not as many people are reading my weekend blog posts. That  could be due to the content, because I promote things differently on social media on the weekend (I don’t think I do) or simply because not as many people are online.

If I was a proper marketeer, I would spend the next month only writing about food, only "sharing the love" if it was a recipe and only posting on weekdays. Instead, I am going to keep posting mainly as I have been. Then, starting in November, I will change my posting days to Monday and Thursday (instead of Tuesday and Saturday) and see if that makes a difference to my audience (i.e. you).

In September, my blog had a bounce rate of 70%. That means that for every 10 times someone visited the site, 7 people left it without looking at more than one page. This is a pretty high bounce rate! Most ‘real’ visitors (who stayed longer than a second or two), stayed between 1 and 10 minutes.

How can I make you stay?
I probably already have. I’ve linked to a number of other pages throughout this post, so chances are that more than a third of you have clicked on those links. Sneaky!

Actually, there are two reasons I’m not currently worried about the bounce rate. First, this is a blog – not a website that’s asking you to buy or donate or sign up to something or trying to inform you in-depth about a specific topic – so by its nature, people will be arriving to read the most recent post then leaving again. Second, it’s a pretty new blog, so there isn’t much to see. The more posts there are in each tag, the more likely people will be to stay and read them.

We were watching George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces on 4OD, and this ad came on.

A number of smiling women run lightly past the camera, through a wooden farm gate into a field of yellow grain. The sun is shining and the women are dressed in summery clothes: a red sun dress, a red and white striped t-shirt, a red headband, a white cotton dress with red flowers, a fedora with red band, a red button-up shirt. The music drips with contemporary folk pop nostalgia.*

After two or three seconds, I turned to my partner and said, “I bet this is Special K.”

And so it was. The women make their way through the grain (a hand strokes the grass), a vineyard (a laughing woman steals a grape) and an orchard (two smiling women crunch on red apples), before bringing their “harvest” into a barn artfully back-lit by bright sunshine. The group then sits down together at an outdoor table to feast on nature’s bounty in the form of some cereal from a box.

The voiceover tells us that Special K is “opening up the world of granola”. What on earth does that mean? Well, this granola has “thirty percent less fat” (than what? I can’t read the tiny print), so people can now “feel free to enjoy” their cereal. Is the ad making the point that we live in a dystopian world that polices our enjoyment of granola? Not deliberately, I'm sure. I think they're speaking to their target audience: people who aspire to look like the happy, active, social and wholesome women models in the ad (who are all able bodied, skinny, well groomed and mostly white).

Sarcasm aside, my almost-instant recognition that this was an ad for Special K piqued my interest.  It reminded me that Special K has outgrown its original place as a minor runner in the Kellogg brand stable to become a super-sub-brand of its own. 

Special K’s visual identity comes through in this ad partly in its cast of conventionally attractive, slim women (target audience’s desired outcome) and red clothing (brand colour), but there’s more to it than that. Brandhouse offers an insight into the visual evolution of the Special K logo:

These brand elements are carefully encapsulated by the granola advertisement, too: the confident women, the morning sunshine, the red clothing with white and blue secondary colours (like the new logo), the visual focus on a plentiful harvest. The recurring imagery of opening gates and doors reinforces the positive, active language of the voiceover (“Special K is opening up the world of granola”) and the music (“Take me outside”), building the feeling of fresh opportunities, new days and your chance to become a new (better, healthier, skinnier) self.

The use of multiple actors also reflects Special K’s recent use of social, interactive elements in its marketing. If you don’t remember their two-week challenge, you can easily check out the “My Special K” section of their website. This is a diet/fitness resource where members can not only log food consumption, track their exercise and get “personalised info . . . to keep you on the right track” but are encouraged to “invite your friends” and “share your meal plan” – because “a healthy lifestyle gets easier with your supportive friends cheering you on”.**

So, social dieting is Special K's thing, I guess: no longer is a woman laughing alone with salad, women are now laughing together with granola.

* I could write a whole other blog post about the reasons Special K has sampled this tiny part of Laura Mvula's "Green Garden", how if you listen to the whole song it becomes much more synthy, how watching her video clip helps highlight the very specific kind of "outside" produced within the Special K ad (and how white it is!). In fact, why don't you watch it and see for yourself. . .

** Of course, the real reason Special K wants us to share is that the diet industry is invested in making you and me and all our friends and acquaintances feel like we’re always deficient, always failing to reach a certain standard of being – whether that standard is the attractiveness of the models used in their ads or an “ideal weight” their plans can help you decide upon. They want everyone to feel we have to “do more”, so we buy more diet food – or, in other cases, more gym memberships, more body-sculpting clothes, more quackery, more fitness apps or more surgeries.

Got something to add to this analysis? Want to mock the marketing jargon of We developed a Brand Story about ‘Inner spirit, outer sparkle’ . . . ? Share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.