This is going to be one of those stats and traffic posts, so if you don’t like graphs and speculation, look away now. I confess to not having bothered looking at my stats for several months until Scott K posted a very interesting conversation not too long ago about his stats and how he analyzed them to determine how the Typosphere blogs tend to affect many other things in the typewriter world, and how our audience is quite a lot larger than we generally think it is. One thing that jumps out at me in taking these screenshots is my readership hit a bump when I re-did the look of the site the other day. Maybe people don’t like the new look, I dunno. We’ll see.
My stats from Google Analytics for the past month for my blog. It shows about 80-150 people dropping by every day. Over 2000 people came by last month, and a rather pleasing number are repeat customers. That green slice has grown slowly, but I’m happy that 1/3rd of my visitors come back for more.. Let’s see – 33% of 2,143 is a tad over 700 peeps. I would take a wild stretch and say that maybe 100 of them could be classified as “Typospherians”, or the people who actually comment and engage socially on the site. Who are the other invisible 600?
Curious about my reader’s demographics? Well, you’re mostly male and generally not a teenager. Blog seems unpopular with the YA crowd.
Where does my traffic come from? Well, like everyone else, the overwhelming amount of traffic comes from Organic Google searches, ten times the number for any of my “referral” sources. However, an interesting thing has happened to my referrals. For years, most of my referral traffic came from The Typosphere Blogroll and a half dozen key Typospherian blogs. In the handful of months since I last looked at my stats, a new 800-pound gorrilla has stomped onto the stage – and that gorilla is the Typewriter Database.
Here’s just my top 10 referral sites. The Database has surged ahead of the Typosphere Blogroll as a traffic generator, bringing in twice the traffic. The Thrift Shopper Forums is another surprise. I occasionally post nice thrifting finds to those forums, and they seem mostly dead to me – very few posts in any given month, but man, it brings in some eyeballs. The old stalwarts Writing Ball and oZtypewriter are still contenders, and StrikeThru has vanished.
Now all this is interesting, especially since I’ve been assuming that the Typewriter Database wasn’t a really high-traffic site. That assumption turned out to be really wrong. Really, really wrong.
On April 5th, I got around to installing Google Analytics on the Database, just to see what was up. Well, traffic is what’s up. Let’s take a look:
The Database gets about 300 to 480 visitors a day, 32% of whom are repeat customers. That sucker is more popular than my blog now. Bounce rate of 53% is crazy low. People don’t come just to look at one page, they stay and browse around.
The audience of the Database is significantly more diverse than my blog – still mostly male, but by less of a margin, and the ages are distributed much more evenly.
Hmm, ok. So where does the Database get it’s traffic? Again, mostly organic Google searches, but The Typosphere Blogroll and the powerhouse blogs are the main drivers of referral traffic. My own blog only shows up at #10.
And I dunno if you’ve seen Google Analytics “real-time” stats view, but it’s pretty awesome:
I have often wondered about traffic in the Typopshere. Whether 50 or so sites cycle visitors infinitely through their pages, and how those niche pages relate to the rest of the web. And I believe Google Analytics kept me in work at some point, being the only person who ever a) looked at them and b) suggested the stats might be the only hard evidence for evaluating the value of a non-trading website.
This does back up my assertion that a large amount of casual users do float through and past. I think the collecting community is larger than we think, but they are largely quieter users and hunters.
Thanks for this. It is interesting to get a closer look at someone else’s stats than mine.
And also reminds me why I should have gone back to wordpress rather than sticking with blogger.
It also tells me a bit more about why, since late last year, almost all of the new “Hunters” signing up at the Typewriter Database are all people I’ve never heard of – collectors who don’t engage much with the Typosphere – and some with very significant collections who’ve been collecting seriously for many years. I suspect you’re very right about there being a vast audience that we touch that aren’t very interested in the social interactions, or maybe we have yet to hit upon the right thing to engage them with.
Oh, and I think the dynamics in relation to women reading is quite different to what we think.
I love it! It’s very interesting to see. What I’m actually also curious about, is which search query was used on the search engines that got them to the database or your blog. And how are the spambots filtered out in Analitics? It sure looks neat, especcially the real-time stats, but I don’t like to use anything from Google (use sourceforge’s awstats instead) .
my ranking search terms have been pretty much consistently topped by “naked lunch typewriters”, “hermes 3000 manual” and “lettera 32 manual” for years, other than those three, the search terms tend to range strongly towards certain typewriter typeface searches and various other subjects I’ve covered, each usually bringing in a handful of hits.
Neat tracking tools. I never used Google anything other than what comes with my blog. I do use a more detailed tracking package on my radio website.
Like Spider, I’ve also wondered how to filter the spambots. Once I enabled captchas again my blog traffic went down and so did the spam from the Hermes clothing company.