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I have traditionally done earnings reports every month but it has actually been several months since I last posted a true “Analytics” report for DragonBlogger.com. Using the magic of Windows Snipping Tool and Paint.Net I was able to compile all of my metrics into a single image to show readers the stats for April 2010 on DragonBlogger.com according to Google Analytics.

As you can see from the picture, my site had 15,401 Unique visits, with just over 20k pageviews.  75% of my traffic comes from Search Engines which is very very high, only 12% of my traffic comes from referring sites like StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook and other referral networks.  12% of my traffic is direct which is via bookmark or email link from my feed.  My site has a 71% bounce rate which is much better than the 80+% bounce rates I was having, this is due to me adding more YouTube video demonstrations in my posts which keep a reader on the site longer.

My site has reached a visitor plateau for about four months now where my site traffic stays hovering around the 15-17k user mark and the 20-21k pageview mark.  Despite my search engine traffic increasing slightly, my social networking and promotion of my site just doesn’t have much impact to my overall site traffic.  If I were to literally stop using Twitter tomorrow, I would only see about 200 less visits per month to my site, which almost makes me question why I spend so much time on Twitter.  For me it just isn’t an effective promotional tool for this blog, however it is much more beneficial to my Poetry blog where almost 5% of my traffic comes from Twitter visits.

As I realize where my search engine traffic comes from, most of my traffic comes related to my technology / software related reviews and instructional articles.  It is ironic that 2 sponsored posts from SocialSpark account for the highest number of individual page views on single posts in my site.  This is good because it means my sponsored posts are being found and reaching users which is what the advertiser wants.

How did my fellow bloggers fare in traffic stats for April 2010?

-Dragon Blogger

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This is a guest post by Melissa Tamura.

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While Google Analytics is thought to be an effective way to analyze your website, here are a few alternatives that are just as good!

1. Chartbeat

Chartbeat prides itself on allowing customers to “watch the dashboard in action!” By featuring realtime action that Google Analytics simply doesn’t provide, many people actually prefer Chartbeat. In one dashboard it actually incorporates the historical data that Google Analytics provides, but in its second dashboard the consumer is told the instant any action is occurring. Some of the most interesting features of Chartbeat are its unique scroll mapping and page pausing. These features allow the consumer to see exactly how far users scrolled down on their website page, as well as where they paused. Another cool feature – page density – lets the website author see how many visitors are viewing specific parts of your site at any instant.

2. Reinvigorate

Reinvigorate is also an analysis program that is realtime as well. Website designers who have a personalized desktop client and javascript installed can view exactly when visitors view their site. By seeing this analysis broken into time increments throughout the day, website developers can evaluate certain needs for their website with greater detail than their Google rival. Customers who use Reinvigorate are also immediately notified when visitors perform certain actions on their site. Also, heatmapping technology (similar to CrazyEgg) is integrated directly into the program. With hourly, daily, and monthly breakdowns, Reinvigorate allows website designers to configure their site to its specific needs. It also doesn’t hurt that you can track analysis directly from your desktop.

3. Piwik

Many companies dislike the data ownership policies of Google Analytics. Because of this, Piwik has surfaced as a user-friendly, open source alternative. One of the great benefits of using Piwik is that it runs on PHP and MySQL. Both are not very difficult to set up and begin running smoothly. Because it is purely web based, users don’t need to download any tedious programs to view their analysis. Perhaps the most impressive aspect about Piwik, though, is its speed. The dashboard is incredibly fast, especially when it is switching between screens. Some might say that this is because Piwik does not collect as much data as other alternatives. However, it is still an efficient way to analyze your website.

4. Engine Ready

Engine Ready is a fairly cheap alternative to Google Analytics. It has very effective visualizations that allow users to compare sales figures, returning visitors, and first time visitors in one graph. With a good pool of data, users will be able to identify trends that will ultimately better their company. One of Engine Ready’s greatest features is its simplicity. Using understandable graphics that are usually represented with different colors, anyone can understand the ways customers navigate through their website. Like Google Analytics, the basic stats that most services offer are also provided in a format that is easy to read.

5. Mint

Our last alternative to Google Analytics is Mint. Mint provides a comprehensive breakdown of site activity from the previous day, week, month, and year. Page views and unique visitors are some basic stats that Mint offers, but this program also has some complicated statistics as will. For instance, users of Mint can break down different referrers by seeing who is a repeat, recent, or unique customer. Mint is also cutting edge in that it lets users flag specific pages to assess traffic and content. By employing this tactic, website designers can determine which pages on their site are most effective. Finally, it definitely helps that this program is very easy to install. Once it is installed, Mint has an interface that reads very easily. Website designers don’t want to dig through their analysis for statistics. They want it presented in a simplistic way. Mint does just that. So have a mint!

Melissa Tamura writes about criminal justice degree online for the Zen College Life directory of online schools.

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There is a unique Google Chrome Extension called iPageRank SEO Tool for Chrome that shows you every websites pagerank as most other plugins do but goes several steps further.

Clicking on the iPageRank button gives you your websites keywords and the frequency of which they appear, I tested this on my poetry blog and saw what my keywords looked like. There is also a separate column called “performing” on the right which I assume shows which keywords have lead to clicks on your blog from Google Search engines but I don’t know for sure.

What is most intersting is if you just hover over the iPageRank button instead of clicking on it. You will see a breakdown of all your internal and external links and which ones are DoFollow internally and Externally. You will also get a metric of how much PageRank you are leaking out of your blog per link. I don’t know how this is calculated or how accurate it is, but it is a very interesting metric to me.

My Wanderer Thoughts Poetry blog had the highest PageRank of 3 for all of my blogs and was leaking .018 PageRank per link (this would be around 60 external links would drain a whole PageRank according to this formula.) The plug-in is worth its weight in gold as it helps you see what keywords sites are leveraging (useful if you want to scout competitor or like sites and try to get keyword ideas) and shows you how much DoFollow linkage you have going in and out of your blog.

I am curious to know if any of my other bloggers have used this plug-in or something similar and have any experience on this PageRank per link calculation?

-Dragon Blogger

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I have decided to post a full traffic report for 2009 for DragonBlogger.com to show you the results of my first full calendar year blogging.  I originally started this blog on August 23rd 2008, so I didn’t have a full year of traffic to show previously.  According to Google Analytics (which doesn’t track Su.Pr links or some other traffic sources)

DragonBlogger.com had a total of 141,667 unique visits and 276,532 pageviews for 2009.  This is an average of just over 11,000 visits per month, which is much lower than my average of 15,000 visits per month for the 2nd half of the year.  My site averaged around 200 visits per day in January 2009 and is now up to almost 400 unique visits per day average over the past few months.

My traffic sources have changed too dramatically over the past few months, for the whole year my traffic sources were 59% from Search Engines, and 25% from referring sites, with 14% from direct traffic.  But in the last four months my traffic is around 71% from search engines and about 20% direct traffic, with my referring sites being a lower percentage as I relied less on Entrecard, StumbleUpon and other sources for “quick, but not long term” traffic spikes.

Twitter meanwhile accounts for only about 1% of my blog traffic and falls under the Referring sites.  While I still had a staggering amount of traffic coming from StumbleUpon over the past year as my posts were randomly stumbled by readers (and a few by myself).  The breakout generally shows that 84,000 of my visits were from Search engines.  This is a good thing and a bad thing, the fact that the blog gets so many visits from Google searches means that my blog is indexing well in the search listings and people are searching for things that link to my blog.

The disadvantage however is that should some other site take over some of my popular keywords or categories which Google has me doing well in the search results, I could suddenly see a huge drop in traffic if I were to lose the top 5 search slots for some of those search terms.

My top search terms for the year included 5 related to “Unfollowing” in Twitter, which is one of the highest risking terms for me losing traffic in the future I think.  Meanwhile Shiny Search was my #1 keyword and I was in 2nd place behind the company that makes the Shiny Search website.  I also have a few for Heroes reviews, which also will likely taper off if the show comes to an end after its 4th Season with the Nielson Homescan which is one of my oldest posts getting a lot of traffic as well.

My top pages that were visited over 2009 are:

This again shows that the Twitter unfollow is one of my biggest traffic sources for single search, my actual “category” page itself brought in 15,028 visits for the year (which is odd that it hit my category than a single article).  I don’t know if its a good or bad then when your categories are indexed by Google and the category itself is a high traffic source.  I also have some high traffic to a few NBC Heroes reviews, the Nielson Homescan and my post I wrote in September 2008 about Managing your iPOD with Songbird for Ubuntu.  Funny that a post I wrote in September 2008 still received over 2300 visits in 2009.

Summary:

2009 was a stellar year for DragonBlogger.com, I was happy to have made some high search engine placements and gain enough traffic to be listed in the Top 10 Technology Blogs listed on IZEARanks.com.  This also was great because I saw my Alexa.com rank drop from just over 100k in the first part of the year, to less than 50,000 toward December 2009.  I do however have concerns that some of my highest traffic posts will suddenly lose traffic, so I need to constantly generate new content and capitalize and new keywords and tags to keep the content relevant.  Writing about content that stays relevant and static for more than a few months is really hard to do in the Technology field as technology changes so rapidly that you can write a post about something in March, and by October it is such outdated information that people will rarely search or read information on it.

That is my full report of my 2009 traffic analysis, I am hoping to at least break 200,000 unique visits in 2010, I would like to be around 30,000 Alexa rank by the end of the year and have an average of 500-600 unique visits per day.  I have little control over reaching these goals except for posting quality content and doing the SEO and promotion to help try and get my site noticed.

-Dragon Blogger

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