TheWayoftheWeb

It’s been just over a year since I switched from running this site on Blogger to the current Wordpress installation hosted at GoDaddy.

As the switch happened midway through April, and coincided with the birth of my son, I wanted to look at complete monthly figures which weren’t quite so disrupted – although obviously this year I decided to disrupt things again by moving to a new job!

So from now on, May 5 will become the official statistical birthday of TWOTW. Sadly I didn’t make a note of all of the relevant stats for comparison when I switched, which I’m now regretting but from May 5, 2008 to May 5, 2009, I’ve received:

A quite frankly astonishing 31,822 Visits.

An also astonishing 46,380 Page View (Must improve my internal linking)

A 70.82% bounce rate (Room for improvement there…)

And a pleasing 1:27 Average time on Site (A benefit of being unable to write a short article for pleasure, having done it as a job for seven years!)

Top referrers:

1. Stumbleupon (By a long way)

2. Google Organic (Gradually increasing after getting indexed and adding more content)

3. Direct (Very gratifying)

4. Entrecard (Blog promotion/ad network which was of interest, but I’ve now dropped due to time and quality of traffic)

5. Twitter (Definitely on the up, although I probably don’t promote my blogs as heavily as I could)

After that things start heading towards the long tail, although interesting to see LinkedIn as my 10th biggest referrer which surprised me a little.

Incidentally, my profiles are on Stumbleupon, Twitter and Linkedin.

Most popular articles:

You can see the most popular articles listed in the sidebar, but what was interesting was the absolutely huge response to ‘Has Microsoft made a major marketing mistake?’ which continues to be popular and drive more traffic than anything else. Which makes me wonder why I didn’t decide to specialise in videogame marketing as a topic!

Rankings:

This is the bit I wish I’d recorded back in May 2008, particularly as AdAge ranks fluctuate a lot:

May 7,2009:

AdAge: 275 (It actually updated whilst writing this post! And dropped 11 places )

Filtered for the UK: 33

Technorati: (Down for maintenance – typical) 64

Wikio UK tech blogs: 38

Junta 42 Top Blogs: 74.

Important disclaimer:

I’m not saying these rankings are the ones to watch, or that I spend all day trying to rise up them. They’re simply a handy gauge whether people might enjoy what I do and generally whether they might link to me. And if I do end up ranked well, it will hopefully mean more people might stumble across me, and out of those people, I might meet more interesting people, have more conversations, and maybe help a few more people by sharing what I’ve learnt.

I also don’t tend to write purely to increase my analytics numbers – I tend to ramble about what I find interesting.

And for those financially minded, I do run advertising as a way to offset the cost of self-hosting etc, and it is just about equivalent to my annual hosting costs. So if you want to monetise 31,000 Visits a year, I’d suggest a blog on something specific and monetisable, rather than ‘digital publishing,marketing, and occasionally music, videogames, gadgets and whatever else I find interesting’!

Update:

In typical fashion AdAge dropped me 11 places while I was writing the post, so don’t complain if you’ve seen me claim 264, but the ranking badge currently says 275. It’s up and down like the Assyrian Empire.