A Small Milestone

This blog does not get a huge amount of traffic, but I would like to point out that sometime last night it did receive its 5,000th visit and its 2,000th unique visitor. Those are some large numbers, even if it took several months to reach them. I thought I would take a moment to break down some of the sources of that traffic.

Geography
The vast majority of my visitors have come from the United States. No surprise there, since I'm an American writing about mostly American theological issues. However, the non-United States visitors are interesting. I've had visitors from Canada (Hello, Canadian Presbytery of the ARP!), the United Kingdom, and South Korea, but also countries such as Cambodia, Bulgaria, Bahrain, and Indonesia.

Within the United States, the state that I get the most traffic from is South Carolina (home of Erskine and the headquarters of the ARP), followed by North Carolina, then California, Virginia and Georgia. I have had visitors from all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia.

Sources
Since I began tracking statistics, I have had a fairly even split between people coming to my site after using a search engine and people being referred to my site by a link on some other site. Direct traffic is a distant third.

Search terms involving Erskine have been the most used to find my site, followed by terms involving "ruling elder" or "ruling elders."

The sites that have referred the most traffic to this blog have been Facebook (hello "Alumni for Erskine" Facebook group!), followed by the blogs of Rev. Brian Carpenter and Rev. Wes White.

Content
The most read articles on this blog have been: Erskine Alumni Associate Joins Suit against the ARP, followed by the more recent General Synod of the ARP 2010, Part 2: The Bad. Most people who come to this site read whatever is on the front page.

What does it all mean?
I love statistics, numbers and graphs, but the question is: can I learn anything from all this data? I believe so: That most of my visitors in the U.S. come from states where there are heavy concentrations of ARP congregations tells me that people in the ARP are reading what I write. That's a good thing, as I write quite a bit about the ARP and issues the denomination faces.

That my most people find my site by searching for things related to "Erskine" and that my most popular articles have been about Erskine or Erskine and the ARP tells me that Erskine has been an important issue that interests many people. I believe it will continue to be important, as well.

Here's hoping the next 5,000 visits to my site will be beneficial to all who come to this blog!