Posts Tagged 'stats'

Twitter/Facebook gave me 1000% boost

Published July 4, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Relax, not me personally, my blog got that boost.
With June (and 2Q) wrapping up last week, it’s an excellent time to gather some statistics around my blog, and I decided to make a comparison to the previous period, and maybe identify some trends. The period I looked at is 1H08 vs. 1H09.

Google Analytics is truly a powerful tool, and I was able to go very deep (drill-down) and round up some interesting figures. I wanted to verify 2 assumptions I made since Jan 2008:

The results supported both assumptions.
Traffic-wise, the first 6 months of 2009 generated 13,004 visits and 18,660 page views, almost twice than the 2008 period. The increase was expected, but the sources breakdown amazed me. I have a 3-step process for pushing my blog’s content: update my twitter, post to facebook and save to del.icio.us – between those 3 networks I cover almost 5,000 eyeballs (directly). It did the trick, big time!
Facebook generated 5 times more visits – 76 in 1H08 to 480 in 1H09, and twitter generated roughly the same growth – 82 in 1H08 to 490 in 1H09. Direct traffic from Google also increased, by 110%, from 2,800 in 1H08 to 6,030 in 1H09.

Location-wise, I got 3 times more visits from Israel, jumping from 930 in 1H08 to just under 3,000 in 1H09. The US remains my main source of readers, with 4,050 visits in 1H09 (comapred to 2,700 in 1H08). The EU were also loyal readers, with +50% increase in France, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. Australia, India and Canada showed similar increases.

To be honest, I expected those results. With the explosion of new media, facebook, twitter, friendfeed and others, I would be surprised to see a lower figure from those 2 sources, especially when taking into account the amount of self-marketing I did these past 18 months.

Looking into the near future, I wonder what my 1H10 vs 1H09 will look like.. what source will show the most increase in visits? will blogs still rule the world or will we all lifestream our lives? What do you think?

Analyzing blog traffic – FF vs IE and FB vs. Twitter

Published July 11, 2008 Uncategorized 5 Comments
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There are two things I like about using Blogger as a blogging platform:
  • Ability to add pretty much everything I see on the web, as a portlet or worst case – using HTML/JS
  • Analyzing traffic using Google Analytics.

I know wordpress and others allow for pretty much the same flexibility, and probably, someday, I will opt for WP in my own domain.

I’ve been incorporating some metrics into my blog, part of the openness and sharing I feel any blogger must adhere to. There’s no point sugarcoating things, not in the web 2.0 era.
Eventually, things come out. There are two interesting statistics I’d like to share, and your feedback and opinion are most welcome.

Firefox vs. IE
The first graph is analyzing traffic based on the user’s browser.
Apparently, people using the fox are spending double the time on my blog (65% to 32%), even thou the gap in number of visits (FF vs. IE) is only +200 pages, in favor of FF. I’m not the first to observe this, as FF is also the fav browser over at Luis Benitez. My guess is that FF users are more technology savvy – in a recent study, over 83% of FF users are running the most updated version. Also, I guess FF users are more custom to getting their daily fix by un-traditional medium – blogs, podcast, forums, twitter and such (in contrary to traditional sources as CNN, Fox, BBC, Ynet, Calcalist, etc). Then again, there could be no reason what so ever…

Twitter vs. Facebook
The second graph analyzes the top 10 referring sites to my blog, excluding direct traffic and search engines results. There are also columns for pages/visit and avg. time on site. I’ve highlighted in purple sites leading traffic to my blog, and in green the average time people spend.

In #1, way ahead of the rest, planetlotus.org, THE place to be heard, seen and read, at the Lotus community. The #2 site referring to my blog is Google Images. A surprising result I might say, but still, shows you the importance of image tagging and ‘alt name‘.

What I found more interesting is the 4th column, Avg. time on site. Apparently, people coming over from Blogger spend the most amount of time, over 5 min! In web 2.0 terms, that’s A LOT.

At #3 we can find traffic coming from facebook, which is also interesting. I tend to post stuff to my profile, from my blog and other sources. Good to know that although I don’t get that much traffic from facebook (only #8), my facebook buddies are spending 2min on my site!
Thanks friends. Conclusion: they like what they see, so I should keep posting.

There’s also the twitter angle. From time to time I tweet about the things I read. My followers are all early adopters, and technology savvy, so they will check the link out, but will ‘fast-read’ the page and move on. I guess tinyurl is also co-responsible for the traffic – you would click on http://tinyurl.com/63b28k and think twice on http://dvirreznik.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-bff-alan-lepofsky.html.
Hence why twitter is #4 on traffic referrals, but lower on time spent.

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.