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Nationality of visitors to your blog

Over the past few months I have noticed that the percentage of UK visitors to my blog has increased to 45%, from about 20-30% when I first started blogging. While I love and appreciate every single visitor to my blog I want to encourage people from around the world to read and comment.

The proportion of people from outside the UK and America is tiny.

 visit

1. United Kingdom 44.84%
2. United States 34.72%
3. Canada 4.90%
4. Australia 4.80%
5. Ireland 1.46%
6. Singapore 1.04%
7. New Zealand 0.94%
8. Belgium 0.63%
9. India 0.63%
10. Italy 0.52%

 

I’d love to encourage more overseas visitors to my site, but think that having a co.uk web address is contributing to this bias. Does having a .com address just mean you get more American traffic?

Have you written any posts which have generated interest from other countries?

Do the majority of visitors to your blog come from your home country?

Would you like to encourage people from other places to visit?

Have you had any success in cultivating overseas visitors?

All ideas gratefully received!

30 replies on “Nationality of visitors to your blog”

Do you know what I would love to know all the countries my readers on Savidge Reads come from but I don’t have a clue. How do you find out are there specific programmes? It would be brilliant to know.

I don’t think Google Analytics can be used for wordpress.com blogs bcoz it uses javascript which is not allowed unless you self host. I tried it some time back but let me know if you find something too.

I used to use a widget which updated the visitors places but a few told me they were uncomfortable, so I removed it.

Isn’t there a wordpress analytics widget you can use? I’m surprised to hear that you can’t use it, but I don’t know that much about it.

Why didn’t people like the location widget? I find some of them amusing when they state the town you are coming from – they never get mine right – it seems to be a different town each time I log in – some of them 100+ miles away!

A couple of them told me they lived in places that were not very common and the widget shows immediately where the person is from while they are on the blog. I guess some people like their anonymity and I can very well understand that.

OK. I understand – the widgets pin me down to about 1 in 2 million people, but I can see how they might be annoying if you lived in a remote place.

Analytics shows me a pie chart very similar to yours. The majority of my readers are in the UK and then the United States, Canada, and then Australia and a small chunk from mainland Europe and the Phillipines.

I’m not how I would begin to attract and cultivate readers from elsewhere. I think reading diversely and slowly building up a profile are the only sure ways of building up a diverse readership, that and some luck.

I don’t have any visitors from the Philipines! It is interesting to know that we are similar in other ways though.

Jackie, I think you’ll find that this is relatively normal. Most of my blog traffic comes from USA, UK/Ireland and Australia, and about 2% is from Africa, Europe and Asia/Oceania. You have to remember that not everyone has access to the internet – and if they don’t speak English why would they bother looking at your blog, much less commenting on it? You’ll also find that some particular blogs/domain names are “banned” — my sister lives in the UAE and she can never view Typepad blogs unless she uses a computer that re-routes through Australia.

I understand that there will be few people in some countries with access to the Internet, but I seem to be losing diversity over time. Even countries like Australia, Ireland and New Zealand visit me quite rarely. I only had nine different people from Ireland visit in July. I think my dominace in the UK search results means that I am falling out of the search engines for other countries and I’d like to try to change this, but I’m not sure how.

Hmm… that’s interesting.

I stopped analysing traffic, fretting over whether people were commenting, making sure I post every day etc about two years ago and I have to say my life is much less stressful because of it! Ive got circulation figures to worry about in real life, though. 😉

It isn’t something I’m worrying about – I am very happy about the number of visitors/commenters I get, but just noticed that the number of countries seemed to be getting smaller and thought someone might know why. I’m thinking about moving to .com, but am not sure if that will mean I just get US visitors. The world of search engines is so much more complicated than I imagined!

To answer Simon’s question, I use clustrmaps. Just click on the widget in my right-hand menu bar to see where my traffic is from. Mostly USA (probably due to the .com), UK second, Canada third. I have some traffic from German-speaking countries but that’s not surprising, given the amount of German-based content I put up. What is surprising is that it’s not greater. Probably because I write in English.

Clustrmaps is great tool. Free as well!

I do like your clustrmap widget. I have a similar widget on my ‘about me’ page. Comparing mine with yours just proves the lack of diversity in my visitors. I haven’t had a single visitor from South America and one from Africa (I’m not sure what time frame it covers) but even so the difference is striking.

Mine is well over 50% for the USA, followed by Canada and then the UK. I’ve always assumed it was because I am American myself, read mostly books that are guaranteed to be released in the US, and because it seems most bloggers I know are Americans. I did attempt to find more book blogs from the UK a while ago since I live here now, but it was a bit tough going. I do have a lot of nationalities on my site but no idea why they dropped by.

Hi Meghan!
Do you self host? I see you have a .com address, so that would explain the higher number of US hits.
I remember trying to search for UK blogs in the beginning too. I really struggled to find ones I liked. I have found quite a few now, but that has been via networking rather than search engines. All the good UK blogs seem to be hiding!

I’ll tell you something I discovered. When you blog about something that’s very specific to that particular country, you get hits from there. Like for example if I blog about a book that’s very famous in a particular country but isn’t all that well known otherwise, you would probably get more hits from that country.

I get quite a few hits from my country because I have blogged about a couple of books that are famous only here.

Or even when you blog about a food item, movie that is specific to a certain country.

Other than that I don’t know much. Do let us know if you find anything else.

Violet – What is your visitor profile like? I’m interested to know as you live in India, but have a .com address. Are your followers mostly US? What percentage Indian visits do you have?

I did notice a spike in Australian visits after I reviewed The Slap, so perhaps I just need to review a few more Irish books!

From what I knew when I had installed some widget, it was distributed mostly to US, UK and Canada. But I did get visits from India, Pakistan and Middle East too, occasionally from Africa.

Mine is almost all US and Canada, with the UK running in second place, but is only about 8%. I have noticed that I will get a nice pickup of hits in the country of a book’s origin, especially if I make a big deal out of it. I also have noticed that if I pick up a loyal follower from another country (you in the UK, Melody in Asia, Dar in Canada) I will slowly build up other followers too. I use Google Analytics which is really more information than I will ever use, but is nice to look at now and again.

I haven’t noticed the loyal follower affect – probably because most of mine are from the UK and the US. Unfortunately Violet isn’t producing a massive influx of Indians. I guess there is still time for that to happen though!

Something like 60% of my visitors come from the US. I don’t have very many from my own country as far as I know – I think the traffic I see in analytics is all me, responding to comments and etc 😛 I’d be cool to meet some local readers, but I love connecting with people from all over the world. That’s part of what makes the internet so interesting.

Also, I feel the same way as Violet does about location widgets, probably because mine is also easily recognizable. I find myself avoiding going back to blogs who have them to check for replies to comments, etc. I can’t help it, it really makes me uncomfortable.

I love the ability to talk to everyone around the world too!

I have recently met some local bloggers and I love that too – it is really nice to be able to talk to like minded people in person. I hope you manage to find some local readers one day.

Most of my traffic comes from google or other search enginges (probably about 80%), and most of my traffic is from the the USA (about 65%) . I wonder if there is a UK search engine that sends traffic to strickly uk sites? Does google discriminate by IP address?

I haven’t read the other comments, so sorry if someone’s already said something similar.

Yes – if you go to google.co.uk then you’ll get UK search results as a priority. Even if you go to google.com when you are in th UK you get the option to tick a box for UK results. I think this is what is leading to my ever increasing UK traffic.

Most of my traffic comes from America (and I do mean thousands more visitors than other countries), and then Canada, the U.K., Australia, Belgium, and India. I chalk a lot of it up to the fact that the blog is in English. I do get hits from certain countries when I review a book from that country or that talks about that country. When I announced I was reading A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman, I got 3 hits from Sri Lanka, where the author is from and the book is set. It is not true for all of the countries but a good portion. Still, we’re talking about single to double digits for all countries India and below. I wish that there were more readers and commenters from around the world, but then I think of how many blogs from countries other than those listed above do I go and visit and comment on?

I mostly have readers from the U.S. but I’m open to people from all countries reading my blog. I don’t know if the .com would help or hinder … it might perhaps but seems like you are doing pretty well anyway.

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