December 2013 Traffic Report - Bright Ideas for eCommerce Entrepreneurs

Welcome to my December Traffic Report. To see November’s report, click here.

As traffic generation is a challenge faced by every entrepreneur, at Bright Ideas we’ve made a habit of publishing our traffic reports as a means of giving insight into how we are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. Plus, writing the report forces me to look! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.

Click to Tweet: Check out BrightIdeas.co latest monthly traffic report

Audience Overview

As you can see from the chart above, overall visits were up 34.45% from 8,645 to 11,623 (a new record) and unique visits were up 42.82% from 4,615 to 6,591.

In looking deeper into where the traffic came from this month vs last, the biggest gains were as follows:

Direct traffic increased 74.77% from 2,699 to 4,717 visits
Twitter referrals increased 173.83% from 298 to 816
Facebook (mobile) referrals increased 446.94% from 49 to 268
Referrals from NathanBarry.com went from 0 to 351 (he helped me promote my book)

I suspect the reason Twitter and Facebook referrals were up so much was because I was aggressively promoting my Digital Marketing Handbook, as well as recruiting the help of others – and I’m happy to say that the book launch was a huge success!

Conversions

The conversions overview has always baffled me. It’s not a particularly hard report to create, however, it never agrees with the data that I get from Infusionsoft. Being as I trust Infusionsoft more than I trust GA, I’ve appended the report with the actual data.

Landing Pages

The conversion rate of our home page improved slightly, from 5.11% to 5.61% – although we didn’t make any changes to our home page.

Traffic Sources

As you can see, the largest portion of my traffic is from people typing in the URL – or at least this is my understanding of this report (if I’m wrong, I would love for you to leave the correct interpretation down in the comments).

A few months ago, we started to use campaign tracking links extensively in our emails, and you can see that emails to our list definitely account for a significant portion of our traffic. If you aren’t yet building a mailing list, you need to start now (check out our 2013 income report to see how incredibly valuable it is to have your own mailing list).

Referral Traffic

Social media is an absolutely wonderful tool for content promotion (a topic I cover extensively in my book) and in this report you can see that Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all made incremental contributions to overall traffic. What I cannot tell for sure is how many people saw our content on social media and then decided to type in the URL instead of clicking the link.

Summary

When it comes to understanding GA, I consider myself a complete neophyte. GA collects a ton of data; I wish I was better at interpreting it. That is part of the reason why we are going to publish traffic reports on an ongoing basis – we hope to get much better with our understanding of analytics.

If you are an analytics guru, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below as I, and the rest of our audience, would undoubtedly learn a thing or two!