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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Welcome to my March Traffic Report. To see February’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! 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 March…

Traffic

Mar 2014 Traffic

As you can see, our traffic was significantly higher in March than in February (13,429 vs 7,351). However, pages viewed and visit duration were down, and bounce rate was up.

This makes sense, given that we received almost 2,000 visits as a result of one of our posts (The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again) going viral on StumbleUpon, which is one of the sites we use to promote our content. The StumbleUpon traffic had a very high bounce rate, and most visitors spent very little time on the site, likely because most of the visitors from StumbleUpon weren’t a good fit with our audience.

We also received some additional traffic due to an Infusionsoft webinar we hosted on March 11, since Infusionsoft sent some of their leads to our site during the week leading up to and including the 11th.

However, most of the additional traffic was almost certainly due to an increased podcast production schedule that we implemented in March. In March, we went from approximately 1 podcast post and 2 text-based posts per week to approximately 5 podcast posts and 2 text posts. The additional content led to more reasons to visit the site, as well as more content promotion and social sharing.

For the month of April, we have shifted down to 3 podcasts per week, so that we have an opportunity to focus on our Groove Digital Marketing agency activities.

Conclusion #1: Overall traffic was up significantly from February, due to significantly increased podcast production and also to one post ‘going viral’.

Subscribers

Mar 2014 Opt Ins

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I believe the conversions in Google Analytics are a rough estimate of actual conversions (opt-ins), and should be only loosely considered. According to GA, conversions in March were at 302 compared to 107 in February. These don’t agree precisely with my more reliable subscriber numbers from Infusionsoft, but are within 10-20% and are good enough to indicate trends.

Clearly, our additional traffic led to additional opt ins. We had also run a split test in February on an alternate main landing page header, and it didn’t convert as well as our original header. So in March, we returned to using the original header.

We created a new Infusionsoft-specific landing page prior to our March 11th Infusionsoft webinar. We received a significant number of opt ins from people who visited this page (according to GA, 94). This makes sense since people who are interested in Infusionsoft are more likely to be a good fit with our target audience. A number of these were associated with the webinar promotion, and others were as a result of an Infusionsoft Google PPC advertising campaign that we ran.

We received significantly more opt ins as a result of emails that we sent announcing posts (82 vs 3). This is one area where again I’m not sure I trust GA, since most of these folks should have been subscribers already, but it’s also very likely that there were more emails forwarded to people who then subscribed. We actually sent the same number of these types of emails in February and March, so I’ll attribute this more to the nature of the popularity of our March posts (the LinkedIn  and marketing agency posts I mentioned above, as well as a post updating you on our agency activities).

Here are some other highlights with respect to opt ins:

• Our opt ins as a result of Google organic traffic increased almost 3x (20 vs 7). We actually had slightly fewer, shorter organic visits on average, although this was not statistically significant. Unfortunately with keyword “not provided”, it’s difficult to analyze and the reason for the increased opt ins is unclear. It’s possible that it’s as simple as the return to our original landing page header.
• Our opt ins that could be tracked directly from social networks and syndication increased 5x (26 vs 5).

Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were up significantly in March, due to increased traffic, and targeted traffic as well.

Referral Sources

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

Mar 2014 Traffic Sources

Once again, the largest portion of my traffic is from people typing in the URL directly. This is followed by our emails to our list, and in this case StumbleUpon was a larger referrer than Twitter.

As far as other social referrals, as it has been in the past, Twitter is our major source of referral traffic, followed by LinkedIn and Facebook.

Conclusion #3: In March, we received a significant amount of traffic from StumleUpon. Other than that, our major sources of traffic (and conversions) continue to be the major social sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).

Other Metrics

In addition to looking at traffic and subscribers on a monthly basis, you want to be sure you’re periodically looking at your pages viewed, landing page conversions, and SEO acquisition reports.

In March, the first two of these were unremarkable, but there was something interesting (if not especially remarkable) in the SEO reports.

SEO & Acquisition Reports

Google has definitely made it more difficult to see which keywords you are ranking for (instead giving the unhelpful “not provided” result). However, you can still look at acquisition reports both in terms of queries and landing pages, and for your top queries, make some educated guesses about which landing pages your keywords are taking people to.

In March, Google did show that we ranked for “how to start a business for under 100,000 dollars”.. again, Google makes it a little difficult to know for sure, but it appears that this search led folks to the somewhat unrelated podcast on how to launch a podcast and get 100,000 downloads a month.

That’s a little unfortunate, since I do believe that a marketing agency is a great business to start, for those with under $100,000 to invest (and with some marketing knowledge, of course).

Summary and Insights

• Our March traffic was almost double that from February, primarily due to an increased podcast production schedule.
• This increased traffic was the main reason that our subscribers were up almost 3x from February to March.
• Going viral on social media may or may not be significantly helpful, depending on whether that traffic is converted to subscribers.
• Targeted traffic that you direct towards a high-converting landing page can lead to much more long term benefits (subscribers).

Additional Resources

• Google Analytics
• Hubspot Analytics

What Do You Think?

If you found this traffic report valuable, and you don’t want to miss out on future reports, be sure to become a subscriber now.

If you have anything you’d like to share or ask, please take a moment to do so in the comments section below, and I’ll make sure to respond.

In particular, I’m curious: What other questions would you like to have answered when looking at the traffic report for your own site?

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Welcome to my January Traffic Report. To see December’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.

This month, we decided to revamp the traffic report a bit in order to answer the questions we most hope to have answered each month.

When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with your own list. Here’s ours:

1. Is overall traffic up or down, and why?
2. Are overall subscribers up or down, and 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…

Traffic

As you can see, our traffic was down significantly in January as compared with December, and was more in line with traffic levels from November. An analysis of traffic sources showed that traffic was down overall from almost all sources except those like Google organic.

The main difference is due to a large spike in traffic near December 10, which coincided with the launch of my book. This makes sense, as we did significant additional promotion at this time.

The book promotion led to a lot of new visitors, many of who may not have been very engaged with Bright Ideas. So this also helps explain why the average visit duration was 23.71% higher in January – those who were visiting the site were more engaged.

Conclusion #1: Overall traffic was down since we didn’t run a major promotion in January.

Subscribers

As I’ve mentioned in the past, the conversions overview in Google Analytics does not seem accurate to me. I have found other sources online that show that while you can trust Google Analytics on data such as visits and pageviews, you can’t rely on their reports for revenues, transactions, goal conversions, or conversion rates.

I’ve come to accept that the Analytics report on conversions is something I can use for a loose metric, but I use my more reliable Infusionsoft data to make real decisions.

The main things I was able to determine from the Conversions report: conversions (opt-ins) were down in January, which makes sense since traffic was also down (again, mainly due to the spike in traffic due to promotion of the Digital Marketing Handbook).

Unfortunately, my Infusionsoft analysis also showed subscribers were down overall even based on November 2013 metrics. Upon further analysis, here’s what I determined about the lower subscriber numbers:

• We used to add subscribers to Bright Ideas if they also opted in through another of my sites, however most of these folks were not entirely well suited for Bright Ideas. Halfway through November, we stopped adding them to our count for Bright Ideas subscribers. This resulted in a significant drop in subscriber numbers (see the December traffic report for details).
• In December, this drop was not as noticeable because we had so many new subscribers due to the book promotion.

Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were down since we didn’t run a major promotion in January.

Referral Sources

I already began to discuss referral sources in the Subscribers section above, but mostly in regards to what I’d seen in Infusionsoft. Here’s where Google Analytics showed my traffic coming from:

Once again, the largest portion of my traffic is from people typing in the URL directly, followed by our emails to our list and then Twitter.

For people who are typing in the URL directly, I can only guess that those people are doing so in roughly the same proportion as the referral traffic whose sources we CAN see. For instance, many of them may already be subscribers, and others will be from Twitter.

When I compared lead sources for new subscribers in Infusionsoft, the only place that I noticed a decline (besides that which we’d attribute to traffic overall being down) was that we had fewer subscribers from a handful of well-aligned partners who helped promote the book to their very engaged lists – specifically, Nathan Barry and Michael Gass.

The other thing I noticed was that the numbers directly from Google were down somewhat. In fact, per Infusionsoft, the number of new subscribers who initially found Bright Ideas from Google search have been trending steadily downwards since August or September.

However, per Google Analytics, our organic traffic has almost doubled since this time. I can only assume this is due to Google providing less data, and that it may have something to do with Google’s Hummingbird update of August 20, 2013.

Google search has not been a major source of traffic for Bright Ideas, because I’ve put little to no effort into SEO up to this point. Still, it makes sense to optimize what we’re doing for the best search results, and we’re in the process of reworking our posting strategy to take this into account (stay tuned for more on this in a future post, and see the link below in the resources section).

We have done substantial work on content promotion since last fall, particularly since October when we hired a full time VA who does a lot of content promotion for us.

When I analyzed the sources that were giving us measurable results, I found them to be:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Google organic

And to a lesser extent:

• Pinterest
• Quora
• Google+
• Business2Community
• Reddit
• Just Retweet
• Technorati
• YouTube
• Stumble Upon

Sources that are giving us little/no results (and what we’re going to do about it):

• Digg (change how we’re doing this, or quit doing it)
• Medium (we’ll continue posting here, since for certain phrases our posts in medium rank on the first page in Google search results)

Other items to note:

• Disqus has been a source of traffic and subscribers. I didn’t enter them above, since the traffic didn’t originally come from Disqus; it’s the plugin we use to manage comments. But it makes sense that subscribers would come from here, since people who comment will usually return to the site when we reply to their comments, and at this point may be engaged enough to subscribe. The number of new subscribers from Disqus has substantially increased since we began offering an incentive in the form of a comment contest for each post (check out the information on that at the end of this post).

Conclusion #3: Our major sources of traffic (and conversions) are the major social sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook). We are getting some traffic from other sites, but as expected it’s less. Our conversions are significantly higher when we get ‘warm’ traffic from well-aligned partners helping with promotion.

Lessons Learned

It pays to take some time to periodically look at what’s working and what’s not, so that you can adjust your strategy. We will continue monthly traffic reports.

Give people a reason to come to your site, then give them a reason to continue to engage with you. Having great content is one thing, but they’re more likely to return and to be engaged if you have a way to follow up with them (this is where great landing pages and lead magnets come in).

Conclusion #4: If you really want to increase traffic, run a major promotion. Just be sure to give people a reason to maintain contact with you if they’d like, so that your traffic spike turns into leads.

Other Metrics

In addition to looking at traffic and subscribers on a monthly basis, you want to be sure you’re periodically looking at your pages viewed, landing page conversions, and SEO acquisition reports. We’ll cover these in detail in a future traffic report.

Summary

• Our traffic and conversions were down in January, mostly because we didn’t run a big campaign like we did in December.
• Traffic was not down significantly based on historical data for months we didn’t run major promotions.
• There are adjustments we can continue to make to increase traffic and conversions.

Additional Resources

• How To Increase Your Search Engine Traffic Using Google Analytics Reports
• Blog Marketing Articles from Technorati
• 12 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic from SpinSucks
• Become a content marketing master with my Digital Marketing Handbook

What Do You Think?

If you have anything you’d like to share or ask, please take a moment to do so in the comments section below. You will get a response.

In particular, I’m curious: What other questions would you like to have answered when looking at the traffic report for your own site?

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