I just got through watching the first video in Traffic School and my homework assignment for today is to take a closer look at my Google Analytics.
Corbett walked us through the basics of GA and while I didn’t learn anything new about what’s inside it has prompted me to pay more attention to my stats. I need a baseline to work to so that I can see how my traffic is improving over the next few months as I implement the strategies I learn in Traffic School.
I’m going to focus my efforts on two websites during my Traffic School experience, the first has been around since 2008 and is an information site with existing revenue streams including Kindle book sales, Adsense and affiliate commissions. The second is brand new, I only bought the domain yesterday, and will the revenue streams will hopefully be via Amazon commissions with some Adsense perhaps.
[Note: I was debating whether or not to post the actual websites here as doing so might skew the figures a little, but then I want this to be a case study as well as my progress journal so what the heck (I don't think anyone's actually reading this anyway lol)]
Oh and since I’m starting the course on July 12 I’m going to report June’s figures.
Onto the June traffic stats…
1. Operation Pixie Dust
This site has been around since early 2008 and used to have a healthy flow of traffic, and then a couple of months ago it really started to tail off. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with Panda but I’m looking forward to refocusing my efforts on this site and nursing it back to health!
Google is currently my main source of traffic, with other sources in the top ten being search engines too. Not surprising really since I have been focusing on SEO to drive traffic to this site.
I do also receive referral visits from Wishlist and this is because I have a membership area which uses the Wishlist member plugin. It was listed in some awards that they ran last year and now appears on their showcase site. Corbett makes a distinction between the different types of traffic and I need to focus on targeted traffic; people coming over from Wishlist will be potential customers of their looking for ideas of what they can do with the plugin, I doubt many of them are actually interested in Disney vacations!
Next up let’s look at visitors. As I say the number of visitors used to be much healthier than this but it’s really dropped in recent months.
Now I’ve been beating myself up in recent weeks about Panda and what on earth have I done to my website, but if we move to look at trends over time we get a different picture… For some reason my stats only go back to March 2010, I think that may have been when I switched domain names and I must have started a new Analytics tracking code. But look at this graph, year on year my traffic is higher than last year but it looks cyclical.
While the information on my site has a range of information from thinking about going to Disney to booking and then planning what to do when you get there, the most popular content is in the thinking/booking area. And I wonder if people start to think about going to Disney during the winter months, with traffic peaking in early January to coincide with special offers and plans for the New Year.
Ok let’s go back to June 2011 and have a look at the top ten performing pages.
I was expecting that particular page to be Number 1 because it is the one that I have dedicated time to promoting. It actually appears twice in this list because I switched my theme during June to the Penthesilea theme and in doing so I decided to change the URL of that particular post (with a 301 redirect from the old URL).
It receives significantly more traffic than the second page which is where I give away some autograph pages that I created. Note I said giveaway; I used to use that page as a gateway into my membership programme because I offered the pages as a bonus to people who signed up. I stopped the programme last year and moved to offering the content in a Kindle book instead so for the time being I’m just giving the pages away. This might change again as I learn more from Traffic School!
I also have quite a few Page Not Founds which are from a three day period in the middle of June when I had a technical issue and lost some of my media files from WordPress (including the autograph pages). That page shouldn’t appear in the listing next month (July).
Again How to Celebrate your Birthday appears twice because I decided to alter the URL, this one is popular because people search for terms relating to free Disney birthday passes (a one off promotion they ran a couple of years back) and this page ranks for those terms as it’s about Birthdays at Disney World.
Health Assessment
Well yesterday I would have said that my traffic health at OPD was terrible, but now it looks as if it’s actually not that bad and that my traffic is seasonal. I’m going to try and track down some older stats to prove/refute that theory.
There is definitely improvement to be made though and I would like to double my year on year traffic over the course of the next six months.
I have a decent level of traffic coming from search engines already, especially Google, but it is dangerous to rely on such traffic so I want to spend my time looking at other methods to bring people to the site. I’d also like to increase the time they spend on each visit and the number of pages they view. It would be good to have more people come back regularly too!
Site 2: Geek Free Guide
As I say, this one hasn’t even been unwrapped yet so traffic reports will start in July.