Bijan Sabet

Your Tumblr reach is likely bigger than you think

Many folks on Tumblr add Google Analytics to their page. That way they can get some useful data from Google about who is coming to your site.

I do this as well. And the data is quite interesting.

But it really doesn’t tell the whole story.

A huge (understatement) part of the traffic & engagement on Tumblr is happening inside of the Tumblr Dashboard (for those of you unfamiliar, the Dashboard is where you follow others on Tumblr).

And visits and page views to your site inside the Dashboard won’t show up on Google Analytics as far as I know.

But that’s only one thing.

The other thing is that there are times where your post will get reblogged by others. So for example, I have something like 3k followers on Tumblr. If one of my posts get reblogged by a few folks then that post also gets to reach their followers in their dashboard. And if a reblog happens from one of their followers of my original post, then the distribution reach is even farther.

And none of those are captured properly in Google Analytics either.

So while it’s interesting to check out Google analytics from time to time, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Your reach on Tumblr is bigger than you realize.

Curation and distribution of content on Tumblr is one of the things that makes this place so special. It’s why I always think about Tumblr has something much different than a publishing tools service. It’s a network. And it’s a community.