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Monday, January 14, 2008

2007 Traffic Stats - Hopefully a Meme

I've seen a couple of posts (Matt Cutts, Dave Taylor) talking about their relative web statistics for 2007. While my stats are very low in comparison to theirs, I was hoping that I could entice fellow bloggers to post some stats about their traffic in 2007. I thought it might be interesting to share with each other and I'm guessing there will be a few surprises.



Some thoughts / comments...
  1. You can get more detail on my Top eLearning Posts.
  2. You can see that Search Engines generate more than half the traffic. Referral traffic is generally from other blogs. Direct traffic is generally from RSS readers.
  3. This somewhat understands reach of the blog since I provide full feeds and many people never leave their reader to come to the web site.
  4. I would guess that these percentages are similar on other blogs, but I don't know.
  5. You can see that traffic is pretty steady and growing. Weekends and holidays are very slow compared to weekdays.
  6. As compared to many of my clients, my percentage of new visitors is very high. In fact, I would tell most of my clients that they should be doing a lot more to capture and keep those visitors. But, my guess is that these numbers are similar to other bloggers and I shouldn't worry too much about keeping them.
  7. The two pages per visit has been astonishingly consistent over the past few years. I'm curious how that compares as well.
Will anyone else share similar stats?

I'm especially curious about folks in the worlds of learning / eLearning and KM.and maybe the related world of KM.

I'm hoping some of the following folks would be willing to reciprocate with some stats.

Andrew McAfee
Are you game?

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find it odd that the two metrics engines I have on my blog generate totally contradictory stats. Performancing has my readership at more than double that of Google Analytics.

Not that either of them has me breaking even 100 a day, it has to be said!

Tony Karrer said...

Karyn, do you have the script at the same place on the page. Sometimes, putting them at the bottom of the page means that they won't get run because the page doesn't load fully.

Anonymous said...

Tony:

I'm not on your primary list, and I have not devoted the same time to tracking stats, but here is what I can tell you. My eContent blog had 59,677 page views in 2007, or an average of 163 page views per day. In addition, I am hovering around 400 subscribers via RSS. Finally, here is the statistical breakdown for the last 30 days: 22.1% direct, 55.8% searches, 22.1% other sites.

Cheers!

Rich

Anonymous said...

Ah! Now this is where my lack of technical nous and fluency in html-ish lets me down, Tony!

You have a good point.

The Performancing script is much higher up the page than the Google analytics script which, as you suspected, is right at the bottom of the page.

That explains the discrepancy.

However, I am such a putz with code, that I tend to struggle to make these things work at all, so I'm a bit nervous about trying to move it. Rats! I wanted to use the stats for my dissertation :-(

Nancy White said...

Ok, I bit. http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2008/01/14/tony-tags-me-on-2007-traffic-stats/

Karl Kapp said...

Tony,

What view did you use to get everything in a nice neat column?

Thanks,
Karl

Tony Karrer said...

Rich - thanks for the info.

Karl - you can drag around the boxes, but I also cheated and used a graphic editor.

Christine Martell said...

Tony,
This is so helpful. While my overall numbers are nowhere near yours on my blog or the one I admin for an ASTD chapter, the rest of the stats are within a few points of yours. I have been wondering how to think about what they 'should' be, and had no idea what to compare to. Most of what I found was geared to looking at a site from an advertising perspective, so it's really helpful to see where other learning professionals are.

Thanks for being willing to share and start the conversation.

Anonymous said...

That's great. Even though you may not have the reach of some of the people you know, you kill mine. :) Granted, I started about two months ago and am still trying to drive traffic ;) I've also got a narrower focus of Call Centers and Development, so restrict some. My average is about 10 visitors a day currently!

Good luck in 2008!

Anonymous said...

The numbers are a little different since we've only been online since August, but the stats are somewhat similar.

What do you do with those numbers?

Do you alter your blogging approach? Or are these just "good to know" numbers?

Tony Karrer said...

Tom - I wanted to hear about comparative numbers because I wanted to know if:

1. Do other bloggers have more page views per visitor? If so, then I should look at enticing more clicks to relevant content, and look at those blogs for ideas on how to make it more sticky.

2. Do bloggers get folks from other kinds of sources? It appears Harold does. Not sure how.

3. I believe you've preloaded your articulate mailing list to generate subscribes. Do they visit? What difference does that make? Should I look to take my list and add folks who I know are not likely to use an RSS reader.

Not sure what else I would find. So far, I've not seen much that is making me think about particular changes. But, I'm expecting to learn a thing or two.

Certainly, it appears that several bloggers have had slow growth of traffic over the years - see Harold again. That's been my experience as well. And subscribers and traffic have not always corresponded.

Anonymous said...

I was wondering less about the comparisons here, and more about what you do with your blog stats in general?

Do you use the data for anything?

Our initial traffic came from the customer list, but since the launch it's just been word of mouth and people who come to the site to look at the software. We don't really do an email newsletter. In fact, many of the blog readers don't use our software.

Up until now, I haven't really looked at the data. Although I am more inclined to so, now:)

Jay Deragon said...

I started my blog, www.relationship-economy.com) on 7/7/2007 and here are my numbers

# of visit: 105,331
# of page views: 406,314
# of post: 234
# of Responses: 293

I share my post in numerous places

Anonymous said...

Hi - here's mine from Sept 07 onwards


Tony, from my test Yahoo Pipes I did, which uses the following :
feedburner.com
feeds.feedburner.com
edublogs.org
techweb.com
informl.com
mlearning.edublogs.org

and has a filter of just the words 'e-learning' and 'United States' - I get results from your blog as the only or top entry each time :-)

Cathy Moore said...

Tom, I use my stats to see how well I'm attracting and keeping new readers.

For example, stats help you judge the "stickiness" of your site. "Bounce rate" tells you what percentage of people leave without looking deeper into the site (so a lower bounce rate is better). Other stickiness figures are the amount of time each person spends & how many pages they read.

If you start to change the kind of posts you publish, the stickiness figures will help you gauge if you're going in the right direction (as will, of course, the number of subscribers).

Another useful figure is the number of visitors from search engines. This helps you judge how well your content matches popular searches and attracts new readers.

What I find interesting is that a third of my subscribers have signed up for email delivery, which I offer through Feedburner. This reinforces my sense that a sizeable proportion of people in corporate elearning are traditional in their use of electronic communications, if email could be considered traditional.

Tracy Parish said...

Fun idea Tony. Here's mine:

http://discovery-thru-elearning.blogspot.com/2008/01/webstats-2007-meme.html

Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher said...

I haven't been using analytics all year, so I don't have the "cute" Google chart. (I like stat counter but did Analytics too, like Karyn. I am glad to hear about the differences between the numbers. Interestingly my analytics is higher on the page but still has lower numbers than stat counter. I'm going to look again.)

So, you have very impressive stats, to say the least.

I have right around 200,000 page loads and 140K unique visitors for the year.

I always am nervous sharing stats because when we do that, so many of the beginners might think that their blog doesn't "count" or that their stats aren't important.

Even with my 2,000 readers I still often feel like I'm blogging for just myself. It is so important to remember that each person is an important individual who can glean something and that if a blog has 30 visits a day that is great!

In fact, if it is 30 quality visits it may be worth more than 3000 cursory glances.

Do you think posting stats discourages beginners from trying? Is it productive? (I did share quite a few stats on my blog the other day but have been asking myself that question quite a bit.)

Tony Karrer said...

Great question Vicki. I'm not sure I have a good sense of it. Curious what everyone else thinks.

Anonymous said...

In response to Vicki Davis's question, "Do you think posting stats discourages beginners from trying?," I have to say absolutely not. For me, a fairly novice blogger, the discussion is very enlightening and inspiring. I've been so focused on the content and design of my blog that I've never really worried much about the stats. I started my blog about a year ago, but let it lapse. I've only just re-started it, so as you can imagine my stats are pretty miniscule compared to the rest of you. Mostly, I'd say, I'm blogging for myself. But since I re-started at the beginning of January, I've seen a big spike in visits (I'm talking from 0 to 29) :-). And now with all the great information I'm getting from you, I'm going to take some steps to drive that traffic even higher.

Anonymous said...

Okay Tony, you've gotten me to install Google Analytics on Friday night.

My resistance since first thinking about this when I started following Michele Martin's 'better blogging' series this summer wasn't so much the amount of time to install (30 minutes and completely painless with the nice WordPress plugin), but rather the risk of further distraction from blog writing...spending time following and obsessing about my stats (on top of already I following links-in and del.icio.us tagging) versus using what blogging time I am able to carve out to for higher-value (to my goals) reading, thinking and writing.

My primary motivations for blogging are: (a) my own learning, (b) building a network, (c) building an ePortfolio for recent and likely upcoming job search, (d) paying it forward (giving back), and (e) improving my writing.

For me, attracting and retaining visitors is a nice-to-have bonus mostly for the ego -- okay, I guess attracting visitors tangentially supports 'b' and 'd' (for 'd', if nobody is interested in reading, have you really 'paid it forward'?) -- but not what I am really 'here' for.

I'm currently in a blogging inactivity period as I'm consumed with my contractor gig, so my small 3-day sample I imagine is biased by that as well as the sample size.

That said: 39 visits, 62% from search engine, 97% new visitors, 1.8 pages per visit.