Site Visitor Statistics
There are many interesting findings from my Google Analytics statistics for the five months from Oct 1/2010 to Mar 1/2011. This site was started in Aug/2010 and launched with Google Analytics in Oct/2010. I would like to share my observations with hopes that you find it interesting - and relevant if you are similarly building web properties.
This is the breakdown of traffic sources From Oct 1/2010 to Mar 1/2011. As can be seen, the majority of traffic comes from referring sites. Search engine traffic is steadily increasing from the 1-month average of 2.66% in Nov/2010 to the current 5-month average of 9.27% (16.44% in the past month). See the Nov/2010 traffic source breakdown page.
Search Engine Traffic
93.58% of my search engine traffic comes from Google while Bing and Yahoo combined account for 2.56%. Google Analytics counts Google image searches in the Referring Sites category instead of Search Engines (go figure!). My image search traffic accounted for 8.68% of total overall traffic so in reality, my search engine traffic is 17.95% and referral traffic is 64.01%. It is encouraging to see the fruits of my building backlinks effort.
Direct Traffic
I surmise this is the result of people bookmarking my site URL in their browser or people typing it in based on offline sources (I do not do offline advertising so it is not likely from this source) or the desire to type (it is a long domain name!). This is an encouraging outcome where people have enough interest to bookmark my site.
Referring Sites
There are over 200 referring sites and the list is growing as I continue to build my backlinks which 1) achieves visibility of my site in search engine results and 2) brings visitor traffic to my site.
Facebook accounted for 20.65% which is the single largest source. Twitter is 2% which begs my attention to get more followers. Delicious is 2%. It is encouraging to see the traffic results from my efforts in leveraging social media networking.
Time on Site
The average time spent on the site along with the number of pages per visit are very telling signs of the interest and relevance to the visitor. A high visit count with short visit duration suggests there is initial interest or curiosity but that the site content is not so relevant or interesting after all. A long visit duration suggests interest and relevance. A high visit count with long visit duration is the best scenario.
Visitors referred by Delicious (2%) viewed 6.69 pages per visit with 11:45 (min:sec) average duration. Facebook referrals (20.65%) viewed 3.52 pages with 4:29 average duration. Twitter referrals (2%) viewed 2.34 pages with 3:28 average duration. Google search visitors (9.27%) viewed 2.30 pages with 1:20 average duration.
Concluding Comments
Getting people's attention and time is not an easy accomplishment on the Internet. Even though there are 6,845,609,960 humans with almost 30% of them being Internet users, there are many available options competing for people's time online. It is both humbling and rewarding to get attention and time with hopes of increasing exposure moving forward.
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