Bright Ideas November 2013 Traffic Report - Bright Ideas for eCommerce Entrepreneurs

Back in mid-October, I published our very first traffic report after seeing a huge boost in traffic that resulted when I applied some new content promotion strategies that were shared with me.

As traffic generation is a challenge that we all face, I’ve decided to make a habit of the monthly traffic report (plus, starting in January, we’re going to start publishing income reports, so if you don’t want to miss those be sure to become a subscriber).

The goal of publishing these reports is to provide you with more transparency about what is and isn’t working for us here at Bright Ideas. If you think this is a cool idea, please be sure and share this post.

Click to Tweet: Check out the BrightIdeas.co November Website Traffic Report https://brightideas.co/nov13-traffic-report @trentdyrsmid

Audience Overview

November 2013 Audience Overview

As you can see from the above report, overall visits were down 14.33% and unique visits were down 3.80%. Not as good as we would have liked, however, given that November’s traffic was up 52.85% from September – a huge gain for just 60 days – the results aren’t as bad as they might first appear.

Conversions

November 2013 Conversions Overview

The graph for conversions above is a bit confusing due to some changes we made in the goals we are tracking. As you can see, the blue line (November results) dropped off quite a bit on November 20th. The reason for that is that I stopped counting conversions that originate from my old blog as that blog, while “dead,” still gets about 150 conversions a week from a Youtube video that I have that gets about 2,000 views a day.

Being as the traffic from that video isn’t really my target audience any more, I thought it was kind of silly to be counting conversions in my goals report.

Now, regarding the big uptick in the yellow line…it went up a bunch on November 15th because I didn’t really use Google Analytics (GA) to track conversions very much prior to then.

Confused yet? Hopefully not…and in future reports, it should be much more straight forward. If you have questions about this, please use the comment form at the bottom of this page.

Landing Pages

November 2013 Landing Page Overview

The big win for this month was the 234% increase in the conversion rate of our home page. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that in October, I gave the blog a facelift….and you’ll also know that the new look totally bombed from a conversion perspective (oops), so I quickly released the redesign that you see today.

Unlike a “traditional” landing page, the home page has many calls to action, and the only one that I’m tracking in this report is actual conversions (new subscribers) from the home page. What I am not tracking in this report is when a new visitor clicks one of the calls to action on the home page and then becomes a subscriber from the second page they view. If I had more time and was better with GA, I’d probably get this set up…but, I don’t, so this is all I have for the time being.

Traffic Sources

November 2013 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 (when I release our December income report, you are going to see how incredibly valuable it is to have your own mailing list).

Referral Traffic

November 2013 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!