Since we launched this new blog, I’ve been trying to avoid obsessing over the traffic stats. Other than occasionally checking the average daily visitor count — currently hovering around 50-60 — I have been steadfastly ignoring the reports. Today, however, I finally gave into temptation, and here are some of the results for the month of May:
Nobody’s Business had 1399 visits from 766 unique visitors, each of whom looked at 1.4 pages. 89% of these visits came from the United States, and about two thirds of the rest came from other English-speak countries, with Canada and the U.K. tied for top honors.
Almost half of our visitors were first-timers, which means that the other half were people who had seen us before and decided to come back. That’s pretty good. Advertising-driven sites are often obsessed with the raw number of visitors regardless of source, but for a blog, I pay more attention to the figures for returning visitors. That’s our readership. (Hi everyone!)
This is reflected in the fact that 41% of our visitors arrive directly, and 50% arrive from referring sites. The top referring site is Rogier’s original Nobody’s Business blog, which sent us 38% of our visitors, presumably from his last post, which tells his readers about us.
Randazza’s Legal Satyricon sent us about 9% of our traffic, presumably due to this mention of Rogier’s post about how much the war on terror sucks, which is also the single most visited post on Nobody’s Business.
My own pimping at Windypundit acounts for another 8% of our traffic. Popehat‘s main page accounts for 5%, as does Fred Humbolt’s shoutout. Our automated Facebook announcements account for another 5%. Only 122 visits come from search engine traffic, with no particular search terms standing out.
I’d love for us to have ten times this much traffic, but we’re actually doing pretty good for a blog that started without a big advertising splash. One thing that’s hurting us is Google’s unwillingness to trust our site with a PageRank. Too many people were trying to game Google by setting up fake sites full of links, so Google’s ranking algorithms are now officially suspicious of all new sites. Once we’ve been around a little longer, I hope to see that change.
You should also be sure you’re tracking your subscriber count on your RSS feed, or have a bug in each post that you can track… otherwise you’re likely missing a good number of readers who may never actually visit the site, but still read your content (like me).
Good point. I’m not sure how to track our RSS subscriber count. We have 57 subscribers through Google, but I don’t know if other sites are hitting our feed, nor how many Google subscribers also hit site itself. (I find new stuff in Reader, but I always read posts at the site itself.) Must do some more research…
I’m one of those folks who only pop over to the site when I’m leaving a comment, the rest of the time I’m still reading every entry in Google Reader.
Love the site, I followed from Rogier’s old blog keep up the good work and I’ll try to spread the word to my friends.
I’ve been a long-time reader of Rogier’s former blog, and missed it when he let it alone. Always a good read, always refreshing. There is damn little honesty left in the world, and I rarely felt stupid reading there.
So far, this place seems to carry forward, but I do miss the anecdotes of his kids, since parenthood never goes out of style, and we leave little else of value behind. Carry on!
Loving the site. Just linked a couple of recent posts. Looking forward to reading more.
For what it’s worth, I’ve had no luck in figuring out how many people actually read us via RSS.
Have you guys considered putting up a twitter account — even just to post links to posts here?
Thanks everyone. It’s wonderful to get responses of this nature. Happy you’re here.
Bob, I’ll see if I can work out a way to get my girls (and my other kids, my three dogs) on the blog again, from time to time. The new Nobody’s Business is no longer truly my own place — I got great roomies now — and as long as I’m in this shared space, the purely personal stuff seems … not quite as fitting as it used to. Stay tuned, though, ya never know!
I actually just arrived here from Popehat (which I mostly read from RSS) due to Ken’s post.
I’m currently in the “Nosing around the archives” portion of visting a new site. It’s good reading!