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 April.
The analytics shown below cover all of April 2011 and only pertain to the main site.
Comparing to Last Month:
The site is now a solid four months into existence, and while we haven't made many updates yet, it's still very important to track how the site's being used. 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. After a disappointing month of March, April turned things around and provided our best month since launch.
Our overall number of visits was up 41.63% to 8,066, and this was despite having one less day in the month (30 vs 31). Page views were up even more than visits, increasing by a whopping 53.10% for a total of 9997. So close to 10,000! Of that number, about 5300 of those views were on articles specifically, and from the ads we serve on those pages we pulled in $2.38. Every penny helps deflect our hosting costs, and the main site has never contributed before, so it's a positive. Pages per visit was up 8.09%, and the average time spent on the site was up 24.78%. We also saw the % of new visits rise 17.84% to 43.52%, this increase in random traffic helped contribute to a slightly increased bounce rate (up 3.61%) as users who are unfamiliar with your site are far more likely to be one and done.
So what's all this mean? Such a significant increase in traffic was certainly unexpected, but obviously welcome. Around mid-April we had a spike in articles being produced on the site (we even had 5 in one day) and that week proved to have the most traffic. As I mentioned last month, we've noticed a clear trend showing that traffic and page views heavily correlate with the amount of new content on the site. One might look at our spike in traffic and attribute it to the BOM outage, but while we certainly saw a little bump it was mostly contained in the forum, whose traffic is excluded from this analysis.
The top ten articles for this month:
- Movies 2011 - January to March -- Jack Sparrow -- 779 views (up 176% from 282 views in March)
- TOP 5 BEST ROM-COMS OF THE '00s -- PrettyKitty -- 342 views (up 113% from 160 views in March)
- Game of Thrones Reference & Resource Guide -- Patrick Ferrara -- 322 views (new)
- TV vs. Theatre -- Patrick Ferrara -- 252 views (new)
- Evolution of Catwoman -- Crux -- 240 views (down 37% from 382 views in March)
- Movies 2011 - April to May -- Jack Sparrow -- 218 views (new)
- Japan Box Office - 04/02-03/2011 -- JP -- 216 views (new)
- Scottie Predicts (April 1 - 3) -- The Scottie -- 169 views (new)
- Japan Box Office - 04/16-17/2011 -- JP -- 142 views (new)
- Scottie Predicts (April 15 - 17) -- The Scottie -- 139 views (new)
As always, the views numbers are off slightly from our server logs, but this is based on Google Analytics data, so we roll with it. It's expected and normal that some hits will be missed or go untracked by Analytics.
Evolution of Catwoman, which had been the top article for two straight months, was bumped from the top spot by Jack Sparrow's Movies January to March article. Three of the top ten articles this month are holdovers, articles that were written in prior months. This trend can be attributed to Google, and it will be interesting to see if holdover articles start dominating the top ten.
Fun things people searched for to find us:
kj.com (wrong number)
chemistry adam sandler jennifer aniston (they don't have any)
monologue from limitless (sorry, still haven't seen it)
philip morris criminal (smoking is bad, mmmmkay?)
pictures of wednesday addams in casper (don't have any)
"young megan fox" (why is your keyboard all sticky ...)
30 seconds of fame dance with poles (Dances With Poles ... starring, Kevin Costner?)
are the lannisters brother and sister (why yes, they are)
become film projectionist (sorry, profession is dying, we covered that)
bonnaroo 2011 lineup is not good (sounds to me like you already made your mind up)
classic wolf fuck forest (wait ... what?)
confused by hanna 2011 (poor guy)
customer demographic for beauty and the beast (children)
netflix is getting slow 2011 (blame amazon)
does hanna live after fast and furious (...)
Where our readers and writers hail from:
On the international scene, we're still primarily a north american site (and likely always will be). Outside of that region, the UK, Philippines and Croatia were the top three regions delivering users.
We can now proudly say that Wyoming's boycott of WoKJ is over. Our pet hamster deserves most of the praise, he went door to door raising awareness and apparently Wyoming likes their cats. We've still never had a month where someone in each of the 50 states visits in the same month, so we'll work on that. PA, CA, TX and NY are still the four biggest traffic driving states for WoKJ.
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)
Another month, another change in the browser graphs. This month finds Firefox on top, despite a small decline in it's percentage (30.54 to 30.14). Internet Explorer saw almost a 5% drop to 28.81%, and Google Chrome raised 2% on the button to 25.14%. RockMelt is up to 8 visits from 5, good enough for 8th place. 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.
What resolution do you use?
A new addition for this month is what resolution our users use when browsing the site.
A quick look shows that 1280 x 800 is the most popular resolution. The smaller 1024 x 768 is in third place, but thankfully it's down a full percentage point month over month. The site is designed to work on 1024 and up, but really, it looks better the higher your resolution. Speaking of high resolutions someone's rocking 2560 x 1440 (106 visits good for 13th place) and I'm insanely jealous.
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. Heck, drop me a comment with your thoughts, it's always fun getting feedback! Thanks for reading.
