So far, I’ve written 15 Monthly Income Reports, but I’ve never written about my traffic – until today. Instead of just “showing you the numbers”, I hope I can provide you with some insight as to why the numbers are the way they are, and what can we learn from them. Thanks to those of you who emailed me asking me to write about my traffic.
Note: all screenshots taken from Google Analytics (data since October 2008 for The Smart Passive Income Blog)
Overall Traffic
Here’s a snapshot of my traffic since I started this blog:
A few important things to take away from this graph:
- You can go several months after starting a site before seeing any decent traffic. If you look at the very beginning, I had little to no traffic for 3 or 4 months before things finally started to pick up. This just reiterates the fact that you should never give up, especially when you’re just starting out. This is crucial to understand, because it’s those first few months when many potentially successful websites die. Keep at it, and you will start to see results.
- The pattern. There’s a very distinct pattern that goes like this: plateau -> spike -> higher plateau -> spike -> even higher plateau -> etc. The spikes are obviously large influxes of traffic (for various reasons which I’ll get to in a second), that cause more people to stick around later (and spread the word through social media). As you can see, the fastest way to get traffic is by getting these spikes, which can come from things like:
- Guest posts on other blogs
- Links posted on other websites
- Podcasts or interviews
- Posts on your blog that get passed around via social media or social bookmarking websites
- You Don’t NEED Search Engine Rankings to Get Traffic: Sure, ranking high in the search engines for keywords related to your niche is great. I’ve been fortunate enough to recently earn the top 3 spot for the keyword “passive income”. However, search engine traffic only accounts for 22% of my traffic! The other 78% comes from direct traffic and referring websites. So, if you’re worried about keyword rankings, don’t. Write good content that other people will link to and your loyal fans will come back to read, and your numbers will begin to rise.
For those of you interested in exactly where these larger spikes came from, here they are:
- Jan 2009: Featured on Lazy Man and Money – The Best Money Blog You Aren’t Reading
- March 2009: A post I wrote got picked up on StumbleUpon and was shared between 2,500-3,000 people – How to Make Money for Doing Almost Nothing – Part 1
- November 2009: I was featured on both a blog post and podcast on Yaro Starak’s blog at Entrepreneur’s Journey – How Pat Flynn Lost His Job Then Made $203,219.04 In His First Year Online
My goal for 2010 is to get even more “spikes” by doing more guests posts, and writing more valuable content that could possibly go viral.
Visitor Overview
The adjacent graphic shows the overall visitor stats for the blog. I don’t think there’s much to talk about here, except what some of those terms mean. What’s more important is how those terms are affected by different traffic sources, which I’ll talk about in the next section.
- Visits: This is the number of times your site has been visited, both by unique and returning visitors. Multiple page views per visit do not count as a new visit.
- Absolute Unique Visitors: This is exactly how many different people have actually visited your site. It’s important to look at the AUV because it will tell you how many NEW people stop by, which is significant if you’re looking for new readership, subscribers or customers.
- Pageviews: Obviously, this is how many pages of your site have been viewed.
- Average Pageviews: The average number of pages a visitor views upon each time they visit.
- Time on Site: The average time a visitor spends on your site.
- Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of new visitors who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on other pages within the same site.
- New Visits: The percentage of your web traffic that is from new visitors.
The only metric that we want to keep as low as possible is the bounce rate, because we’d rather have people explore through our sites, rather than just leave or “bounce”, as they say in Ebonics. I honestly don’t know what a good bounce rate is, but I’m always striving to minimize the number.
Here are three things we can do to minimize the bounce rate:
- Make the first impression of your site one that is inviting and welcoming. If your site is 98% advertisements, for example, you will probably see a very high bounce rate.
- Provide content that people are looking for or is interesting and relevant to your visitors.
- Make navigation easy. If it takes people more than 5 seconds to figure out how to move around your site, they’re just going to leave.
Traffic Sources
Here’s an overview of my 10 top traffic sources. I’ll go into more detail about some of these below, but I’ve highlighted some key things you should definitely take notice of:
Facebook, as I’ve mentioned before in THE Blogger’s Guide to Facebook, is a very unique medium for traffic. Beyond the actual interactions you can have with your audience on your fanpage (which is amazing and unlike anything else, including Twitter), the traffic tends to be stickier and more loyal. As you can see, my referrals from Facebook provide the second highest avg. time on the site, and a bounce rate that is lower than all of the other sources, excluding direct page referrals.
If you have yet to setup your own Fanpage, you should definitely consider doing so.
StumbleUpon
I sort of have a love/hate relationship with StumbleUpon. As you can see from the numbers above, StumbleUpon is the 3rd top traffic source, but the quality of the traffic is very poor. It has the lowest number of pageviews, avg. time on site, and the highest bounce rate (at 82%)!
When you think about it, it makes total sense. With the way StumbleUpon works, your site can go through a vast number of people in a short period of time because of all of the friends of friends of friends involved with this social bookmarking site. The people who were the ones to bookmark your page may be very interested in what you have to say, but their friends and those people’s friends are probably not.
Search engine traffic always brings in quality visitors because they are people who found you when searching for certain kind of information. That’s why you see that it has the second highest avg. page views per visitor. They are actively looking around for information.
Remember when I was talking about strategies to minimize bounce rate? You can see an example here of what happens when people come to your site and you don’t provide them the information they are looking for. For the keyword iphone app development cost, it has a 72% bounce rate, which is definitely above average on this blog.
Direct Referrals
The other red circles on the above traffic overview illustrate exactly the kinds of high-quality traffic you can get from other blogs. Higher page views, more avg. time on the site, and a lower bounce rates all contribute to the “higher plateaus” that I pointed out in the beginning of this post.
People coming from Yaro’s blog at Entrepreneur’s Journey, for example, spend an average of 7 minutes and 18 seconds on my blog for each visit! That’s a lot of time that people take out of their own day to read what I have to say. Craziness!
Summary
I hope you can see that not all traffic is the same. Let me repeat that. Not all traffic is the same.
Focus on getting that higher quality traffic and you’re sure to see better numbers down the road. This is why writing guest posts is such a popular and powerful thing to do for the growth and expansion of one’s blog. Do you have a guest post writing campaign?
Lastly, don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results right away. Like I said before, it takes time to see results, but the work you’re doing now and putting into your blog will eventually pay off down the road.
One post at a time.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my first traffic report! As always, comments are welcome and encouraged. Cheers!
p.s. If you really enjoyed this post, please consider helping me out and spreading the word below! Thanks!
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{ 64 comments (Click Here to Leave a Comment Below) }
This was very interesting Pat and would enjoy seeing updates on where your traffic is coming from and how it is doing in the future. If you could invest more time into any one way of attracting more traffic what would it be?
Excellent question! If I had to choose one, it would definitely be writing guest posts and trying to get my link on other blogs. Not just websites, but blogs specifically.
Would be great if you could add a monthly breakdown.
You mean if I did a monthly report like I do my income reports?
It would be great as well. But I rather think about one post that you would compare a few months back with uniques/page views. You have published a graph but it is hard to read any numbers on it.
Interesting that Facebook brings in such high quality. Feels like I need to register in a short while…
I’d at least scope it out, however if you’re focused on working on 1 or 2 traffic strategies at the moment, don’t let looking into Facebook detract from what you’re doing already. It’s been a great addition to my brand though!
I’ve also noticed a spike when I have found a new outlet to post my new photos and posts to, aka: when I started posting to reddit, my daily traffic went from about 20 visits a day to 55-60 a day.
I’m still early on in my sites lifespan, and your first paragraph hit home for me. It’s easy to get discouraged, but I will stick with it! Great post Pat!
Thanks Josh! You know, for some reason reddit has never been attractive for me. I don’t know why, but I should definitely check it out some more. Glad it seems to be bringing in some traffic for you though! Cheers, and keep up the great work!
Pat,
Thanks for sharing such details. It’s always interesting looking in-depth at numbers. I have to remember that the pay off is down the road.
No Moon – it’s all about working hard now so you can reap the benefits later!
Pat,
One of the analytics that I find very helpful is the bounce rate. Maybe you can speak more to that later. When visitors come from other sites, but it shows a 100% bounce rate, then I know what they see upon arriving at the site is not what they are interested in. I can do some research and cater a little more to those “bouncers” as long as it doesn’t send other regulars away.
Also, my full time job is working for the HQ of a major retailer, and I like to use the brick and mortar store analogy with blog site development. Traffic to the front page is like people walking past your storefront on a busy street. Levels of conversion (yes, they even use that term in retail) depend on whether people come in the door, how long they spend looking, if they buy, what they buy, and how much they buy in each transaction. I suppose those measures can go even further to include whether they sign up for the merchant’s credit card, etc.
Those steps in the conversion process all apply to sites/blogs also. I’ll talk to you more about his later.
Thanks again. I appreciated this post even if it depressed me somewhat to see how minimal my numbers are compared to yours. We all appreciate your traffic/financial transparency!
Steve
Steve, perfect analogy. I hope everyone here reads your comment because it’s a great way to look at it. I’m sorry that this post depressed you! That was definitely not the intention behind it!!!
Pat,
Poor choice of words I used. The post didn’t depress me…just made me realize how far I have yet to go! I should say it motivated me to keep working, and inspired me to know what was possible!
Great Post Pat,
just curious is there a special stats package you use to gather these stats? I just get basic website stats that are not very robust. Your stats are very in depth. I haven’t worried about it just yet as I don’t generate that much traffic. But would like to learn more for down the road.
Thanks again for the great info.
Hey Marty – i’m using the free services from Google Analytics for all of this. Are you using analytics yourself and not seeing the same type of stuff?
Hi Pat,
This is really interesting information. I do use Google Analytics but had not realized that I could move that little arrow to the left to give me a graph for a whole year (and more!). Oh heck, I just didn’t ever pay any attention to it! Just did it. Cool. I see though that the stats don’t carry over if you changed domain names (even if redirected) and platforms.
Love coming here – learn something all the time. Stuff I take away and apply.
Thanks for sharing this, Pat! This is very helpful information. I’m amazed by the spike and residual plateau that you received from Yaro’s interview. Sweet!
Yeah, I owe Yaro a lot because of how much he’s done for me already. He’s actually featured on an interview in one of my podcast episodes, however I don’t think that will be enough to repay him for what he’s done for me! LOL
Thanks for sharing this Pat. Your transparency is very helpful and great for boosting morale. I’d also be interested in hearing your thoughts on bounce rate. I know that an online ventures are a marathon and not a sprint, but it’s always nice to read articles like this to help keep motivated.
Thanks Darryl, I may do some more posts about bounce rate in the future, however if you check Craig’s comment below, it actually makes a lot of sense regarding BR on a blog.
Cheers!
I like to look at my stats two or three times a month, fortunately they are on a sloooooow but stead climg. I really appreciate the indepth report you provided us as well.
Question: What is the difference between New Visits and Absolute Unique Visitors? Arent’s they both “new”?
Hey, at least they are climbing, right? It would be a bad sign if they were steady decreasing, especially with all of the work I know you’re putting into it. You’re doing excellent! Just keep it up and you’ll see results.
Visits can count the same person more than once, but it doesn’t count the number of pageviews that person makes. So for instance, every time you visit my blog, it gets counted as 1 visit.
With absolute unique visitors, it only counts your FIRST visit. All other visits are no longer unique.
I hope that makes sense!
Just an FYI of course you want a lower bounce rate but with a blog the reality is the bounce rate will always be higher and should not be looked at the same way. The reason is all the content is usually on the first page and you just have to scroll down to read articles, so people may not be clicking around, but could still have a higher average time on the site. I think that number is more important than the bounce rate strictly with a blog.
Craig – thanks for pointing that out, because I hadn’t really thought of that. You’re right, if someone were to land on a post and scroll down, and even leave a comment, but not check out any other pages, it would still count as someone who bounced, am I right? Time on a blog is definitely a number that we should want to maximize. Thanks Craig!
Technically yes, I believe bounce rate is considered anytime some leaves after entering the first page. But some analytics (maybe not Google Analytics) can show you the bounce rate on a scale so you can have a better idea. Lie 0-30seconds, 31-60seconds and so on so you can really break it down further.
Ahh, very cool – I would love to know those kinds of details. I don’t think Google Analytics does that…I think.
HAven’t yet seen it in my Google Analytics, but would be great. There’s alot of difference in bouncerate if you consider timing, especially for blogs. If you show full posts on your homepage of your blog, your reader can read like 10 posts, and leave your website, and it would still be registered as a bounce.
Hi Pat, I think if you enable event tracking in Google Analytics you can go in detail with the bounce rating. For mor information have a look at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html
I’ve played around a littele bit.
Select “Traffic Sources” then switch on the right side at “Views” to “Performance” then select in the first dropdown “Avg. Time on Site” and in the second one “Bounce Rate”
Now you’ve a listing with source, Time on Site and Bounce Rate.
Thanks Pat. The Bounce Rate as compared to the referring source was extremely helpful explanation. Thank you for your transparency.
Anytime Melissa! I’m glad my explanation was clear – pun intended
Hey Pat,
This is great information. It give me a birds eye view of what I should be doing and what I need to be looking for. Analytics is a great tool. Since I’m early in blogging (2mths), I have a habit of checking it daily:-). I think it motivates me to do more of things that gives me good traffic as well as encouragement because I know that even though they didn’t leave a comment, “somebody” was reading and enjoying the blog! Thanks.
Hey Patrenia, I have the habit of checking my stats daily too. Been doing it since the beginning. Definitely a great motivator! Thanks!
Hi Pat,
I got a love hate relationship with StumbleUpon too. I find that it can cause a huge influx of traffic but most of the time the visitors are not sticky at all.
Another point to note is to take note of our most viewed pages on our blog. If we noticed any spike in the traffic to any of our specific pages, trying to optimize that page can result in higher opt in rate. (e.g adding a call to action at the bottom of the post) I did that for a few times and it usually results in some new leads into my newsletter.
Cheers,
Vincent
Hey Vincent, it’s nice to hear someone feels the same way in regards to SU’s traffic. Your tip regarding the pillar articles on our pages is gold. I definitely going to have to implement that strategy. Thanks Vincent!
I like it. Too many bloggers focus on raw pageviews and don’t spend enough time analysing the different sources and levels of engagement they’re getting.
One other thing I would say is don’t focus too much on the actual number of pageviews so much as focus on trends. If you’re trending upwards you are doing well (and then just need to analyse what you’re doing right to maximise). If you’re trending downwards something might be wrong.
Be aware of seasonal changes too and don’t get too discouraged. I lose 30% of my tech blog’s traffic every December because IT departments wind down for the holidays.
Paul – you make a great point. The trends are probably the best indicator of the health of a website, as opposed to a one time snapshot. For my exam prep website, I see the same decrease in traffic over the holidays too. Thanks Paul!
First of all, congrats on your success! Can’t wait to hear some of your podcasts. I agree with Paul’s comment that it’s good to just focus on the overall trends of your numbers. It is possible for absolute traffic to go down one month though – this happened to me and some people I know in December due to the holidays. But this month it appears to be back to normal.
One thing I’m needing to learn is how to break through plateaus. Is there a way to do it without the huge spikes? – not all guest posts result in spikes like that. Or is it more a question of time – you just have to keep putting out content, and it gradually accumulates with more traffic?
Hey MoneyEnergy, thanks for stopping by the blog, and all of your tweets too. Plateaus will generally continue to be on an upward slope if you do keep writing that valuable content, like you said. It’s a slower process without the spikes (and you’re right, not all guests post will do that for you, but don’t forget about the SEO help too!), but with time you’ll see a steady rise. Thanks again!
Hi MoneyEnergy, with the help of Google Suggest you can tailor your Post Titles to the Terms searched in Google. This may give you a spike in traffic once in a while.
Nice breakdown, Pat.
I too think it would be interesting to do a monthly breakdown (maybe of your Green Exam business) to see exactly HOW the strategies you implement generate you passive income!
You might have made your monthly workload that little bit bigger by providing these stats because people are gonna want it every month now. Ha!
Thanks Ian! I would love to do a monthly traffic report, but I think I’ve said most of what I wanted to say already. I don’t think my exact numbers each month would be something worth replacing some kind of content article that people can put into action. I will, however, keep what you said in mind about the before and after with certain strategies I use. Thanks dude!
Thanks for pointing out the traffical value (yeah, I know, it’s not real English, but I can live with that
) of both guest posting and a FaceBook Fanpage. I suppose I should actually make work of both of them.
Hehe, I like the word traffical. Let me know if you ever have any questions on each.
Hi Pat, is your “action area” below the posts custom made or a WordPress Plugin? It looks realy cool.
Hey Tom – actually, I wish it were as easy as a wordpress plugin, because I’d definitely share it with you guys. It’s a hard-coded area done by my web designer, from http://www.blazersix.com. Cheers!
Thanks. Great work. Maybe I should then develop such an plugin.
Hi Pat,
I am very impressed with the quality of information you are sharing. It is great to get some actionable advice instead of marketing hype. Keep up the great work.
Thanks John! I don’t think there’s any more room for hype on the internet anymore. Cheers!
Pat,
Thank you for clarifying in visual form what I continually read elsewhere. That creating a successful blog takes time and you need to experiment with different avenues to attract traffic. Your last few posts have really inspired me. Knowing that you made 6 figures your first year on the internet has given me a new outlook on my goals for this year.This is my third year online and with the tools you have given me I am looking forward to make 100k this year. I can’t thank you enough!
Hey Michele! Keep up the good work and you’ll definitely be on our way to 100k. Glad I could be a part of that process for you! By the way, I know your a mommy of four. if you had to give one piece of advice to a brand new parent, what would it be?
Try to enjoy the baby stage.
And don’t sweat the small stuff. At some point a kid will eat dirt or a bug or something equally appalling. Don’t freak out. It happens. Just like when they get they’re first bunkbed and they have to jump off the top bunk. Things happen. 
The first pediatrician I had gave me the best advice. “They don’t break as easy as you think.” Meaning, yes they are going to tumble and yes they’re going to get dirty, but don’t freak out about the little stuff. You’ll know when they are truly hurt. Secondly, don’t be afraid to set boundaries even as young as 2 years old and sometimes even 18months. I know it sounds young, but you’ll be surprised how soon they try to test their boundaries. 
Remember to love them lots and to try not to spoil them. I know how easy this can be with the first.:)
Thanks Michele! Great words of wisdom right there. I appreciate it!
SEO:
Your SE traffic is too low –> highly cost intensive SMO strategy (how many hours are you spending in promoting your content outside from your web ?)
Bounce rate:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate.html
the guru says: “As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.”
The good’s
* Your churn rate is low –> excellent content
* Plenty of room for improvement
Hi Franck,
Thanks for the comment. I’m interested in hearing more about what you have to say about SE traffic being too low. Do you think there should be a higher percentage? I think I’d much rather have traffic coming in directly from other sites who have personally recommended me, for example.
Lastly, are those numbers regarding bounce rate specifically for a blog? If you scroll up a few comments, some people talk about the special case regarding a blog, because people can land on an article, read the entire thing, and not go on to other pages, while still getting the information they needed or were looking for.
Good bounce rates really vary from site to site. Youtube wants a low bounce rate and you would expect them to achieve it (people mostly go there for some entertainment so will want to watch more than just one 2min video, and they have a recommendation engine to help achieve that).
One of my blogs on the other hand is mostly about solutions to problems and how-to tutorials for IT people. I get a high bounce rate because people arrive, find the solution to their current problem, and move on. I can lower the bounce rate by offering mega-guides and multi-part articles but that just masks it.
100% true paul. In your case, once they have solved their problem, they will most probably leave away … unless to make an undecent offer !
Pat try to use a filter a GA with 2 conditions
Page with Bounce rate bigger that 60% and time duration less than 60 seconds. Then calculate the ratio of these selected pages divided by total pages views. You’ll get an good indicator of “irrelevant content (from a market demand perspective not from the copywritting perspective) rate”. In most case these are low traffic pages, so a do nothing would be ok. In some other you might give it a try to optimize content (keyword & call to action)
Your Bounce rate should be decreasing your your bottom page redesign though I see many links in there: Social media Share | read more in my blog | Email list building. I see no clear favorite in there –> which action to take ¿?
I think you should be very proud of yourself, Pat! Your site and the knowlege you share is fantastic.
Thanks very much for showing your traffic and explaining some of the terminology. I must confess that I didn’t exactly know what bounce rate meant or why I need to keep the number down. I’m predicting that you’ll see a spike in your numbers as a result of this post
Karen
Hehe, thanks Karen! A lot of these terms are relatively new to me too, so I figured some of you might benefit from “the basics” too. As always, thanks for your comments!
Pat,
Very interesting. What kind of traffic spikes (if any) do you notice on days when you post / send out an e-mail / add to your RSS feed? How does that factor into your strategy?
Thanks again!
Joe
Wow, great Traffic. I cant understand all, because my english isnt the best. xD
I have just found this post after reading your 2011 report for traffic and it is really nice to see how you have continued to grow over the last year.
I like this behind-the-scenes look at the stats. I definitely never really considered stumbleupon maybe I should now.