Another month has come and gone, which means it's time for another analytics article discussing the site's performance and traffic over the month of March.
The analytics shown below cover all of March 2011 and only pertain to the main site.
Comparing to Last Month:
Now that we're two full months in, we can actually take a look and compare this month to last. In general, there are six key metrics used to measure traffic: Visits (how many times did people visit your site), Page views (how many total pages did you serve), Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate (percentage of single page visits), Average Time on Site, and Percentage of New Visits. We pretty much did worse across the board.
Our overall number of visits was up 6.29% to 5,695, but the increase was primarily due to the fact that this month featured three additional days. Unfortunately, despite the added days, our page views declined by 5.88% to 9,997 and the number of pages per visit followed suit, down 11.45% from last month. As you'd expect considering the other numbers, bounce rate was up 4.19% and the average time spent on the site declined 26.90%. The percent of visits which were made by people new to the site was up slightly to 36.93% and the number of unique users to visit this month was up from 2186 to 2396.
So what's all this mean? Despite the declines, the numbers are generally steady. We're getting traffic from Google at a decent rate, but we're bouncing the vast majority quickly. That's fairly typical for any site unfortunately, but we can and should drop that number down. All of these numbers point back to one central issue: We just don't have enough content. It's something we internally will work to brainstorm solutions for as we move forward and we're hoping that as time goes on more of our existing base becomes willing to contribute. I think the big question going forward is, what can we do or offer as an incentive to get users interested in contributing to the main site? We have ideas, but we're hamstrung by the fact we operate at a loss. Nothing is off the table, this is a long-term issue we will continue to attempt to address.
The top ten articles for this month:
- Evolution of Catwoman -- 382 views (444 views in February, down 13.96%)
- Movies 2011 - January to March -- 282 views (67 views in February, up 320.90%)
- TOP 5 BEST ROM-COMS OF THE '00s -- 160 views
- Top 5 Drinking Movies -- 153 views
- Scottie Predicts (March 4 - 6) -- 145 views
- Scottie Predicts (March 25-27) -- 121 views
- Album Review: The Strokes - Angles (2011) -- 109 views
- Site Analytics: February 2011 -- 101 views
- Scottie Predicts (March 18 - 20) -- 101 views
- Scottie Predicts (March 11 - 13) -- 96 views
Now the views numbers are off slightly from our server logs, but this is based on Google Analytics data, so we'll roll with it. It's expected that some hits will be missed or go untracked by Analytics.
Evolution of Catwoman, for the second straight month, takes the top spot. It'll be interesting to see what (if anything) bumps it from its perch. Scottie occupied 4 of the 10 spots in February and does so again in March, though he had 463 views on these four articles in March compared to only 425 in February. One of the reasons that the Movies 2011 article has done so well is that it currently (for me) sits at #2 when searching for "movies 2011 january." Similarly, the Strokes article saw significant traffic from Google in it's run to the top 10.
Fun things people searched for to find us:
actor you would like to punch in the face -- Nicholas Cage has my vote
wildflowers don't move to find the sun's rays -- I guess not?
fred phelps retared -- who's the retared now!
girlfriend in a coma script -- I smell bad intentions
how to find good rom coms on netflix -- how would I know?
is christian bale's performance in the fighter the best performance of the year -- apparently it was
service manual drive telemecanique at71 -- say waaaaaaa
shaun ferrara -- wrong number
simplified version beauty and the beast -- wait, it was too complex for you?
the rite kissy lips -- kissy lips, Goldie is that you ...
what is na.kryuchke. -- when you find out, let me know
Where our readers and writers hail from:
On the international scene, we're used and abused most by those in the US, Canadia, United Kingdom, Russia and Portugal (in that order). Some random stats: We racked up 9 visits from Ecuador and 1 from Tanzania. On the political side of things, our Libyan traffic dropped to 0, while our traffic from Egypt rose by almost 40%.
We're bleeding mid-west states like nobodies business! We still are yet to have a single visitor from Wyoming hit the site, our complimentary mug giveaway was a total failure. We're now being boycotted by four states: Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and Vermont. Out pet hamster has reached out to each state's legislature for comment as to exactly why we're being boycotted, you'll know as soon as we know. For now, we can only assume it's because Pat actually wants to hang out with J.K. Livin.
What browsers do you use?
Ever wonder what your fellow writers and readers are browsing the web with? Well wonder no more! (at least as far as WoKJ is concerned)
The big winner this month was Internet Explorer, which rose back to the top spot (why?) with 33.64% of visits, up 3.96%. Meanwhile, in good browser land, Firefox was down 0.64%, Chrome was down 1.65%, and Safari was down 0.88%. Interestingly, we had 5 visits from someone rocking the RockMelt browser, which was just enough to claim the last spot in the top 10. As always, our metrics differ greatly from the global community, I like to think because we're smarter, but it's more likely that everyone else is just dumber.
Well, that's it for this edition! If there's anything you'd like to see expanded upon or added to the article, leave me a note in the comments and I'll try to incorporate it next time. Thanks for reading, drop some feedback on me.
