As the new year is upon us, we will be doing our goals for the 2013 year Thursday, but I wanted to take a look at our analytics for the whole year before I began to set my goals for this next year. As the old saying goes, “Sometimes you have to know where you have been to know where you are going to go next.”
It should first be noted that I use Google Analytics because there is nothing more accurate out there and secondly Dustin Stout showed me some great anaytic dashboard presets from Dashboard Junkies that has been extra valuable.
Bounce Rate
The website term bounce rate is the measurement of how many people who visit your website immediately leave it (high bounce rate) versus someone that comes to your page and then visits a second page. (low bounce rate) The industry standard for a blog is to keep it at 70% or below. Yet, because of proper SEO techniques and high advertised blogs, your number could be 98% because people quickly come to your blog to see if you posted something and leave when you have not and that 98% is considered acceptable. An even better number to look at is how long people are staying on your page and if you have a high concentration above 2 or 3 minutes, you are doing really good.
You will notice a huge dip in the bounce rate and I am not sure why it is. I would love to know why and will keep a closer look at why it is. (I had low traffic in the summer, which might have meant I was not getting a ton of new viewer traffic) We will share how to keep that bounce rate in check and know if your number is acceptable in a later post this month.
Visits by Social Networks
Visits by social networks is how many click throughs you get from links, reshares, and everything else that social networks have to offer to direct social media users to your website. Obviously the higher the number, the better the website. Pinterest has splashed into this world with its crazy high click through rates. Some studies have shown that the click through rates is 5 times to 25 times the amount of Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ and they attribute it to the user community and the visual elements unique to the social network. That being said, there are ways to increase it on all of the different networks and we will address that this month.
The Pinterest levels are great, Twitter has room for growth, and Google+ needs to raise up from #8 place, though I only invested in the social network in November and December, so we should see a rise in that in 2013.
Pageviews
Pageviews can be the life blood of a blog if the other numbers like bounce rate, new versus returning visitors, and engagement with comments are doing well too. This means that we need to increase commenting on the site along side improving the number of views our site gets, something that many bloggers do not do to balance their traffic well. If you focus only on pageviews and leave out the other parts, you actually are getting false positives on your site because people visit your site, but quickly move on and never return. This is good short-term and terrible mid- to long-term.
By no means are these numbers record breaking, but they at least tripled stats from 2011 to 2012. I hope to continue that improvement to hit high reaching numbers at 500,000 pageviews this year and 120,000 unique visitors. No small feat, but is a possibility!
How did 2012 work for you and what do you hope for 2013?
kolby milton says
Great post Jeremy. It has been awesome reading your website this past year. Here is the question of the day! How do you get that much traffic from pinterest?
seventy8Productions says
Dude…. it is crazy. The last 6 months all I have done is pin articles and be intentional about my photos. Nothing more. You doing Pinterest?
seventy8Productions says
25 days later, are you still pinning?
kolby milton says
Yesh….I am loving pinterest. I am seeing some traffic from the site.