Few people are comfortable opening their kimono, dropping trou, and going commando when it comes to their web traffic data. What’s the big deal? If your traffic is small, tell your readers a story about how you’re trying to grow. If you’re huge, revel in it. Of course, it may be embarrassing to some older established players when their huge budgets and expensive focus groups don’t do squat for their web ratings.
Anyway, even without solid numbers, people know how big you are. With your comment volume, Pagerank, and Alexa rankings, they can tell.
I started blogging in earnest on February 1, 2008. Since then I’ve learned some things about traffic analysis. This post is a “brain dump” of what I’ve got so far, but first:
Here’s a totally free billion dollar business idea: The first startup to crunch data from all my analytics tools, plus incoming links, Technorati reactions, comment patterns, and Twitter mentions, AND present it all in a useful way that doesn’t require a computer science PhD to understand, wins.
Now, on with the brain dump:
- I use and recommend Google Analytics, Feedburner RSS subscriber stats, and WordPress Stats.
- Google Analytics is great. Everyone loves it. There are tons of reports, filters, and goals you can set up. The only thing I don’t like is that there’s so much data that it’s almost overkill for a blog. See also: the Analytics YouTube tutorial and the OSX Dashboard widget.
- WordPress Stats is simple, blog-centric, and results are almost real time. GA and Feedburner make you wait for them to batch crunch your data at day’s end. I only just started using WP Stats, but it’s now my favorite “at a glance” traffic tool.
- Feedburner tracks your RSS and Email subscriber stats. It tells you what links in your feed were clicked on and how much traffic your feed drove back to your site. It’s great, but I wish Feedburner stats were rolled into GoogleAnalytics so I could just check one tool. See also: the Dashboard widget.
- Three of my posts have generated traffic spikes, and as of this writing a fourth is brewing.
- What my Mac’s startup sound can teach us about Microsoft, blogging, the universe, and everything - (628 pageviews so far) Traffic from news.ycombinator.com
- The worst Windows XP dialog ever - (644 pageviews) Traffic from reddit.com
- Muxtape: copyright infringement that goes down easy - (1054 pageviews) Traffic mostly from Jakob Lodwick’s Tumblr.
- Intranet design is career suicide - (350 and rising) Traffic from news.ycombinator.com
- “Digg” style traffic spikes fast, falls off fast (as you drop off the feed), and is not very sticky (at least for me). You’ve got to be consistently good to develop a loyal following, but social news site readers seem particularly fickle. They scan fast and bounce.
- If you write about classic linkbait topics (Mac vs. PC, Windows sucks, etc.) you’ll generate traffic. Social news sites are a mess because links are just as much of a currency as money is, and that leads to unintended consequences. Don’t believe me? This company promises to convert your dollars to Digg votes. Anyway, I’m after long term quality and a relationship with readers.
- Traffic from a recommendation burns slower but is much stickier. Jakob Lodwick mentioned my Muxtape post on Tumblr which drove a bunch traffic over several days and prompted others to link to me. Of course, I did write about a topic that’s “going viral”, and I was essentially linking to free music, but I’m convinced that traffic from “influencers” is stickier than traffic from social news sites. My increased Twitter contacts and blog traffic after that post are consistent with that view.
- The Muxtape post is my most popular and most commented post. This supports my point about recommendation traffic. I also think this was one of my better posts because it was all about the basic human need to connect with others (it gave people a forum to recommend music, an intensely personal experience).
- Good image file names and “alt” keywords are your friends. Long term, my most trafficked post is the one with sketches of a chair, my hand, and a figure. That post has a terrible title for SEO, but over time it has attracted a lot of image search referral traffic because the image alt tags are descriptive.
Finally, the most important thing I’ve learned in two months of obsessive traffic watching is:
Nobody knows where their traffic comes from.
Sure, you can tell who your big referrers are, but where did your referrers first hear about you? Organic search results? Blog comments? Word of mouth? As far as I know, traffic analysis can’t go further than your immediate referrer (which is why the cookie vendor that shant be named was so valuable).
As promised, here are links to huge screenshots of my traffic data for the last month:
If anyone has advice on interpreting my data, of if you’ve got anecdotes, tips, or data of your own to share, enlighten us in the comments.
If you’re looking for someone to handle stats analysis installation, performance optimization, or anything else WordPress related, contact me. You’ll find that I’m delightfully obsessed with doing top notch work.
