I looking at my blog traffic from October 1st through October 27th 2008. I seem to have plateaued in visitors and this is due in part because of my reliance on Entrecard for visitors to the website. But my numbers were still much higher than September totals.
For the month of October I had a total of 7,097 unique visitors to my site, here is my visitor and page view breakout. This is o
# of Absolute Visits is the big thing to pay attention to, this is the # of unique people who actually visit your site.
Visits includes people who just hit page refresh or the same person clicking multiple links (this is good) but absolute unique are people who hit the site for the 1st time, it doesn’t track additional clicks or page refreshes.
Pageviews are the number of times a page load has been requested, this is usually very inflated as most admins open their own site to test and refresh the page often which can drive these numbers up.
Time on Site is also important, if you see this number too low, people aren’t even reading your content, they are visiting, dropping EC’s or something like that and leaving. you see my average is 51 seconds and that isn’t really a lot of time to read full article so this means that many Entrecard droppers are “drop and run” on my blog.
Bounce Rate - This is the percentage of people who visit your site and immediately leave without looking or clicking on something else on your site. This also tends to be very high when you use Entrecard as most people just drop and run, though we will talk about bounce rate variations later this can also mean someone came to your site to read a specific article and left without bothering to search for more content.
New Visits - this is the percentage of new visitors to your site, this good if you have a high amount of traffic and means you are bringing in new people and uniques. This can be bad if you are looking for high # of RSS subscribers and return visitors though.
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My average breakout accounted to 319 visits per day which puts me at an Izea Rank in the low 300’s. Which is very good, but as mentioned I saw growth of 100 in September, 200 in early October and seem to plateau toward the end of October. I do have some days where I break over 400 uniques per day, but only 2 out of 7 days the last week hit this high of a number.
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So lets examine Traffic Sources, if you click on your Traffic Sources menu link on the left you will see several options. For now lets stick with the overviews and reading the results. Again for the time period of 10/1 - 10/27 my stats break down like this:
- 18.55% of my traffic is direct (this means someone had my site bookmarked, or typed my URL manually)
- 46.75% is from referring sites such as entrecard, technorati, zimbio…etc
- 34.70% is from Search Engines
This is actually pretty good statistics, almost 20% of the people have bookmarked dragonblogger.com or come to it directly which is 1 out of 5 people. These would be return visitors most likely you can assume. obviously almost 50% of my traffic comes from referring sites, so this can be good or bad depending on the referring sites. I get 1/3 of my traffic from Google searches which is good it means when people search for keywords, my site is showing up and people are arriving on it from Google searches.
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This final graph, (you have to click on the picture to read the numbers and percentages.) shows you that Google accounts for the highest percentage of hits to my site called “Organic” which is very good. Organic means people are finding you and this means a high unique # of visitors. Entrecard is however #2 and accounts for the other 1/3 of my traffic. This shows that entrecard works in bringing visitors, but this also means that if I stopped doing drops tomorrow, I would lose about 30% of my unique visits as people stopped returning the favor. I consider this artificial traffic or manufactured traffic. I have to drop to get drops, and this is a gift and a curse for Entrecard. I do spend way to much time now, almost 2 hours a day doing EC drops and I can’t keep doing it when I could be focusing on writing quality blog posts instead. So in November I am going to wean back on Entrecard a bit and see how much of a hit I take.
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So this is an overview of some high level statistics you can garner from Google Analytics, don’t ignore these, you can look for trends, patterns. Look for which days have high # of unique visitors and see what you posted and how you advertised to learn what works best.
-Dragon Blogger
