June
20
2006
Pushing on, let’s take a look at where the page views in Part 1 came from.
FYI, this data comes from Google Analytics which I’ve had up and running since April 20 so it’s missing roughly six weeks of data but I didn’t feel like buying the premium service from StatCounter.
It boils down to this: “Eric T. Peterson is GREAT for business!” Since historical referral data has been available, Eric is responsible for 28.9% of all referrals.
Notice too, that even though Avinash has only been blogging for about a month at this point, he is already in what I’d call the mid-tier of Referrers.
Organic searches from Google also do quite well at 8.2% but we’ll explore the Google segment at a later time.
Interestingly, two of the folks that I identified as my key ‘Sneezers’ in the last post show up in the small tier - maybe I just like Jeremiah and Robbin so much that I wanted them to be my key sources.
Finally, we can see that directly referred visits are the number one category (just barely beating Eric) at 29.8%.
Oh! And I was surprised at the volume of incidental traffic received from Blogger; which since I am blocking self-generated traffic, must be coming from the ‘Next Blog’ link in the Blogger chrome. I guess I’ll need to segment that blogger traffic and see if there is any value in it.
So, how do my chosen sneezers do on a trended basis? Let’s take a look.
A couple of things to note about this chart:1. Web Analytics Demystified and Directly referred visits are on the left (primary) axis and everything else is on the right (secondary) axis2. As discussed here, I’ve been playing with Excel 2007 and these charts were created in it. Unfortunately, Excel 2007 is still a bit buggy and it kept dropping the x-axis data points so the date range is April 20 - June 14.Okay, with the caveats out of the way, what’s going on here?I’ve got nice smooth growth both from Eric and Direct but my other picks have this odd stair-stepping quality to them.My hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, there is a great commonality between Eric’s audience and those who find this blog useful so I get a relatively steady stream of referrals from his site.The stepwise growth from my other ‘Sneezers’ most probably is a function of when they post something that directly refers to Instant Cognition.The latter is pretty simple to prove - I just need to go look at when folks like Avinash referred here in a post and see how it correalates to the steps in the chart.
For the former, I’m not sure how I’d go about testing it - any thoughts?
One thing that I find particularly gratifying about the chart is the nice smooth growth in direct referrals — I’ll have to do a segmentation study to be sure, but — this seems to indicate growth in brand loyalty (boy I hope that’s true) as my visitors are just hitting a bookmark or typing in ‘instantcognition.blogspot.com’ into the address bar.
Hooray for mid-tiers!!!
My theory on Eric’s steady trend is that unlike the rest of us Eric is extremely well known and has a steady stream of traffic each day and if X % click thru on links on his site then we all in turn get a steady stream of links each day to our websites. We’re just riding Eric’s gravy train.
Your theory on the “stepwise” is right, I think. I don’t post every day, at most twice a week, and the referrals graph from Occam’s Razor pretty much mirrors my “posting schedule”. The interesting thing is that I think it also mirrors (the slope between steps) my traffic which is fascinating.
Segmenting out the direct and then looking for that segment between New and Returning would be fascinating. But even on our business websites “direct” traffic is notoriously difficult to pin down (the “world wide web” is really “weird world wide web” when it comes to data capture).
I anxiously await the next nugget of insight Clint, thanks so much for the interesting analysis. How fun!
-Avinash.
So, because Eric has a ‘real’ website which his blog is a part of, the traffic is steady (and thus so are the referrals). Those of you with full-blown websites attached to your blogs (Juice Analytics and Lunametrics jump to mind) do you see a similar pattern in your site traffic? Or, is your site traffic driven more by your blogs?
Or is my bubble just burst?
As to the direct segment, I know this is a waste bucket for any visit where the referrer is unknown or doesn’t exist but the reason that I am interested in it is the smoothness. I would assume that if it was traffic from RSS readers it would look more like the step-wise pattern from the other blogs.
To Clint’s question: At Juice Analytics, the majority of our traffic is driven by our blog. We don’t expect (or even want) to bring in much traffic for the rest of our site.
We see dramatic jumps in traffic when someone with big-time traffic links to us (e.g. Jon Udell, Reddit, Ogle Earth), otherwise we have pretty steady volume on the order of 400-500 unique visitors a day. Most of our traffic comes from Google searches. It seems that the more you post, the more Google likes you, and the more times you end up on the front page of a Google search.
Zach,
thanks for the info. Do you approach SEO like Jeremiah Oywang or do you spend a lot of time structuring your meta data for search engines? (I’m in the Jeremiah camp which makes some of the terms I come up on very amusing).