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 May.
The analytics shown below cover all of May 2011 and only pertain to the main site.
Comparing to Last Month:
The site is now a five months into existence, and 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. Let's take a look at how our numbers looked:
Our overall number of visits was up 13.56% to 9,160, but there was an additional day in May (31 vs 30). The total number of page views was also up 5.08% to 16,083, but the pages per visit numbers dropped 7.47% to 1.76 pages. I think part of that can be attributed to days when we have no fresh content, people naturally hit the site and move on. What we do have is consumed by our audience, so that's a positive. Over the month, the main site earned only 66 cents, down from the two dollars and change we pulled in last month. That number isn't really surprising, with such low impression numbers, things will change drastically month to month (percentage wise anyways). Sixteen thousand impressions for the main site is awesome, probably the best we've done in years, but in the overall scheme of advertising where impressions are measured by the thousands ... it's still small. Moving on, both the bounce rate and the average time on the site changed in a positive manner this month, and that was despite the percentage of new visitors going up. Those changes can be attributed to the writers, we're seeing more traffic from Google, and they generally seem to like what they read!
So what's all this mean? We had seen some pretty big gains over the past two months, and those gains were retained in May. We actually grew a small amount month to month, even considering the extra day. Positive changes, even small ones, are very good. Toward the end of the month, we started to see the weekend spikes we were used to evening out. We found more traffic during the week, and less on peak days. It will be interesting to see if that continues.
The top ten articles for this month:
- Game of Thrones Reference & Resource Guide -- Pat Ferrara -- 736 views (up 128% from 322 views in April)
- Movies 2011 - January to March -- Jack Sparrow -- 611 views (down 21% from 779 views in April)
- Evolution of Catwoman -- Crux -- 519 views (up 116% from 240 views in April)
- Movies 2011 - April to May -- Jack Sparrow -- 314 views (up 56% from 218 views in April)
- TOP 5 BEST ROM-COMS OF THE '00s -- PrettyKitty -- 267 views (down 21% from 342 views in April)
- Box Office 2011 - January -- Jack Sparrow -- 203 views (new)
- Thor (2011) -- David (Gunslinger) -- 159 views (new)
- My 5 Favorite Directors -- David (Gunslinger) -- 146 views (new)
- Site Analytics: April 2011 -- Karl Schneider -- 119 views (new)
- Scottie Predicts (Memorial Day Weekend) -- The Scottie -- 111 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.
We have much higher view numbers at the top this week, and saw the number of new articles decrease from 7 to 5. I think that's going to be a hard trend to break for a while, though over time, I do expect it to slowly reverse (assuming main site traffic continues to rise). The Game of Thrones reference continues to do well, which isn't surprising since it is a handy guide for those watching the show. We're starting to see some of the legacy articles fed by Google traffic (Jan-Mar, Rom Coms) start to slide down the board a bit, Catwoman, however, just won't go away. With the summer starting, I'm sure Jack Sparrow's newest article will move toward the top before long.
Fun things people searched for to find us:
westeros (IS AWESOME!)
what happened to rotten tomatoes website (It's still around)
insidious changes half way through (wardrobe malfunction?)
best child of eddard stark (he loves them all equally ... except the bastard)
is the movie the roommate scary (omg, like, sooo scary)
thor dutch angle (does Thor have an angle? Obtuse?)
"his well tailored suit" (looked snazzy)
a paragraph on the topic movie you like the most (World of KJ will not do your homework)
anne hathaway catwoman pic (meeooowww)
blond twins in somewhere (i see where this is going)
emma watson vag (Aww come on now man!)
disney movies 2012 princess celtic bow (Hint: Pixar!)
william levy underwear (Hanes?)
leela futurama hot (that's cool, i mean, if that's what you're into)
don't sit down 'cause i've moved your chair (I appreciate your honesty)
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, Canadia and Croatia were the top three regions delivering users. The Philippines, which was previously 3rd, dropped to 5th.
We've done it! All 50 states sent at least one representative to WoKJ in a one month span! Sources close to the representatives tell me that at least 72% left disappointed, but we're working on that. I believe this also marks the first month PA hasn't been the #1 state based on visits. California now owns that title with 920 visits in May, up 19% from 771 last month (PA only had 730 in May). The good people of West Virginia and Maryland have the highest pages per visit at 6.21 and 5.11 respectively. It's nice to see that the people of West Virgina finally learned to read (that or they just keep clicking around looking for pictures).
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)
This month finds Firefox on top once again, increasing its percentage (30.14 to 31.31). Internet Explorer saw another drop, this time of about 1%, and Google Chrome gave back about half the gains it made last month, settling at 23.93%. We also managed 10 hits from a PlayStation 3 this month, which I find fascinating. 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. The good news is, IE may drop below 50% this year in the global community ... maybe.
What resolution do you use?
Now let's take a look at what resolution our users use when browsing the site.
The 1280x800 resolution stays on top, dropping a negligible 0.27%. The 1366x768 resolution leap frogged into second, and the smaller 1024x768 fell to 4th, down another full percentage point from last month. 2560x1600 is still the largest resolution I could find in the statistics, lucky dog you.
Prior Months:
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.
