Analyizing my blog traffic

I’m taking a page out of @fredwilson’s book (avc.com) and analyzing my blog traffic (via Google Analytics) to see what’s changed from last year to this year.  It’s a great exercise that I think anyone with a blog should look at.

In 2009, the traffic stats break down like this:

— Direct traffic / RSS: 39%

— Twitter: 27%

— Facebook: 5%

— LinkedIn: 5%

— Search: 4%

— Other: 20%

So far in 2010, the traffic stats break down like this:

— Direct traffic / RSS: 30%

— Twitter: 27%

— Search: 13%

— Facebook: 7%

— StumbleUpon: 4%

— LinkedIn: 3%

— Other: 15%

Some interesting trends.  First, while my direct links has dropped, my search traffic is way up.  This is probably an obvious expectation of having another year’s worth of content.  I’m a little surprised search is so high but I’ve hit on a few topics that drove a lot of search content that probably juiced those numbers are a bit – the Why I’m down on Foursquare post and the Read this before getting an iPad post.

Second, my Twitter traffic is identical.  I’m not sure what that means actually.  Over the last year my Twitter followers has doubled but my blog traffic is more than 5x, so I would think that the traffic from Twitter would drop.  But perhaps that speaks to the power of networks.  Each person that follows me has another network behind them, so the growth is much more exponential than linear.

Third, I need to reassess my use of the smaller social sites, like LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Digg.  And I’m picky about which blogs I post on Facebook because I don’t want to bombard my Facebook friends with the in’s and out’s of social media.  I only post there when I think its relevant to that audience.  But I think LinkedIn should be driving a higher percentage of my traffic, so I am going to see if I can try that more.

4 Comments

  1. Adam Waid on May 21, 2010 at 6:06 pm

    Jeff-

    Thanks for sharing this. Since your “search” traffic is up, do you know what keywords are driving traffic to your blog? And, are they keywords you are trying to use?



  2. aburtch on May 21, 2010 at 8:28 pm

    I'm not surprised by the LinkedIn stat. With people who follow Twitter and Facebook, the LinkedIn status updates come in a distant third.

    Personally I use LinkedIn more for business networking than following status updates.



  3. Jeff Hilimire on May 27, 2010 at 7:23 pm

    Good question on the keywords Adam. When I strip out variations of my name, I come up with these at the top words:

    imagazines
    sxsw
    social denial
    hollrr funding
    ipad
    foursquare
    mytown
    tripit

    So while I don't have a search strategy (but should), I'm happy to see these terms. It shows that people find my site when researching new technology, which is certainly part of my hope.



  4. […] going on with my blog at this point in time.  Every few months I’ll do this.  The last time I analyzed my blog traffic the results were pretty […]



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