Wellcome Library blog receives over 3,500 visits in 4 months

The Wellcome Library blog, born on 11 November, 2008, has to date received over 3,500 visits and over 6,000 page views. Interest was high initially with 82 visits on its second day alone, while during the run-up to Christmas, and during the holidays, visits waned. But in the New Year visits began a steep climb, and our highest daily number of visits was 99 on 15 February.

Over the lifetime of the blog so far, we have managed to keep the interest of our loyal returning visitors, while also luring in new visitors with around 60% of visits being newcomers. People spend quite a lot of time reading the site as well, averaging 1.44 minutes on the site (with a maximum of just over 5 minutes having been achieved on a few particular days).

Visitors find us from all over the globe – the majority from the UK and the US. Over 90% of US visitors are new, while the UK visitors are 60% returnees.

How do our readers find us? Well, mostly through Google, as expected (33%), while 16% find the blog by clicking directly on a link (presumably in emails or using their favourites). Blogger.com is a great advertiser, bring in exactly as many readers as the link on the main Library website. Twitter is fast becoming a huge draw for the blog, in the past month being the 3rd most likely source for visitors, with Stumbleupon, oddly, being the number 4 most likely source in the past month (we must have been recommended). We are also linked to by many other blogs (most of them are in our blogroll), and this draws in a lot of readers – so a big thank you to all our fellow blog-owners who mention us or add us to their blogroll.

The Library staff have worked hard to bring blog readers a wide variety of interesting and topical news stories, and these statistics demonstrate the value of sharing information in an easy-to-access, informal way.