Half a Century of Posts

Seeing as this is blog post number 50 and I’m almost a year in, I thought I might as well give you a nice update on how things are going.  Back in 2007 (October 10th) I posted the first of the posts on this blog (so what if we can’t measure conversion conventionally) and I didn’t really think that we’d get this far.  But I have, so I think we can all celebrate.  Well I can celebrate, you guys can sit back and have a look at what’s been going on with quite a journey.

6 months ago I wrote a couple of pieces on Traffic for Whencanistop and What I do because of my Analytics.  I think that a good place to start for this blog post would be to look back at some of those metrics that I put together in my first post and update them.

Firstly lets look at traffic levels.  Back at the beginning of April, I was amazed that I was getting 253 visits in a month.  The graph below suggests that I wasn’t really thinking big time enough:

I September I hit new traffic levels of 493 visits.  That would seem quite impressive if I hadn’t picked up loads of traffic in April itself (476 visits).

However we can look at this in a slightly different way – why was April so big in terms of traffic?  Lets do a bit of a comparison:

Ok – well this paints a bit of a different view – the big increase I got in April was because I got a big volume of traffic from a referring website.  In fact, I blogged before on the traffic effects of getting picked up by stumbleupon.

I think there has been a more interesting phenomenon going on with the blog, which I will show you here.  If the increase in traffic hasn’t been because I’m getting more referrals, it must be from other sources, so lets first look at search traffic:

This is much more like it – my search traffic volume has gone up significantly and is now contributing a large proportion of my traffic.  Any additional spikes that I get from referring sites are just going to add an extra bit onto the top of my already sizeable search traffic.

Even more than that – my top two landing pages for search people are Omniture’s SiteCatalyst HBX and Conversion Funnel Analysis: When, How, What.  I think this is odd because these are two completely diametrically opposite posts – one is a post talking about how Omniture is taking over web analytics and is mainly aimed at Analysts.  The other is about how to use one technique for finding conversions and is primarily aimed at those who are thinking of becoming practitioners or are picking up more online work.

Conveniently I do quite well in search engine rankings for ‘conversion funnel‘ (second page) and ‘conversion funnel analysis‘ (first page).  I’m also doing quite well for ‘SiteCatalyst HBX‘ and ‘Omniture SiteCatalyst HBX‘ (first page for both) although these aren’t quite as good as the first two.  HBX is on its way out, so in a couple of months these terms won’t be searched for at all.

Also interesting is that I think that my Direct Traffic is going up as well.  This month I’ve had 30 odd visits and only one post so far and that accounts for about a third of the traffic so far.  This is positive because it is a sign that I am getting more loyal users.

So this leads me to the things that I said I was going to do because of the analysis:

1. Linking to my keywords in the category list on the left hand side – this is something I haven’t done and on second thoughts am wondering how useful it is.  Technorati I am sure picks up these tags and uses them.  I tag things correctly usually, so this should be sufficient – I’m unlikely to rank in the top 20 for generic terms
2. Linking to other posts with appropriate Keywords – This is something that I try to be quite hot on – look at the article above, these have lots of nice links in that hopefully users are going to click through on.  My bounce rate has been getting higher, but that might be because I have more traffic from search engines.  This linking I am hoping is also the reason that my search engine traffic is going up.
3. Post more on popular subjects – This is something I have tried to do and I think that occasionally I am more successful.  I mentioned last time that I should post more on Hitwise.  I have done this and with positive results the Hitwise Twitter page for example picked up my post and helped my traffic.
4. Post more frequently – This is something I definitely haven’t done, although I started with good intentions (6 posts in April).  In August I only posted once and only July since then has had 4 posts (one a week).