May 2014 Traffic Report

Welcome to my May Traffic Report. To see April’s report, click here.

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. Additionally, writing the report forces me to look at what’s going on! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.

The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer what we want to know most each month.

When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with your own top questions. Ours include:

1. Is overall traffic up or down? Why?
2. Are overall subscribers up or down? Why?
3. Which traffic/referral sources are contributing the most to traffic and subscribers?
4. How can we adjust our strategy to increase traffic and subscribers?

Here’s what I found for May…

Traffic

For the month of May, we continues our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities, and the result was traffic numbers very similar to the previous month.

Conclusion #1: Overall traffic numbers were very similar in April and May.

Subscribers

We had slightly lower subscriber numbers for May. Given that we had roughly the same amount of traffic both months, this might not make sense at first glance. However, a closer analysis shows that much of our social traffic in May came from StumbleUpon, much more so than in April, and therefore a higher portion of traffic overall. As I mentioned in last month’s report, this traffic was due to a very popular post (The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again) going viral on StumbleUpon; however, much of the traffic that came from it was fairly low-quality and didn’t spend much time on the site.

Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were down slightly from April.

Referral Sources

Here’s where Google Analytics showed my traffic coming from:

Google Analytics reports the largest portion of our traffic coming from social; in fact more than twice the number that typed in the URL directly or accessed our site due to emails we sent to our subscribers. We did receive over 600 visits due to organic search, which is almost 50% greater than average (which is closer to 400).

Google has made it more difficult to see where this traffic is coming from (thanks to “keyword not provided”), but from what data we can see it’s possible that some specifically targeted posts we created in February and March may be providing the traffic.

Some of the social traffic that was reported was due to a post going viral on StumbleUpon, which began to happen in March and bled over into April and May (we reported this in more detail in our March Traffic report).

Conclusion #3: In May we received a significant amount of traffic from social media.

Summary and Insights

• Our May traffic numbers were roughly the same as in April, which makes sense given that we had a very similar production schedule these two months.
• Our social traffic remained high in May, in large part due to a post going viral on social media.
• Organic traffic increased significantly in May.

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