Remember those days when people used to put website hit counters on their site (actually I still see this every so often)? These days we are more secretive about our stats, or we simply don’t see the need to share them openly with the rest of the world.
After checking my Google Analytics account recently, I thought it might be of interest to publicise some of my findings. So I selected 1 month, April 1st – April 30th 2009, and here are the findings.
Dashboard
Areas of interest
- The most daily visits was on Monday April 20th (3,840)
- The least daily visits was on Sunday April 5th (548)
- Monday is the most popular day (usually the day I publish blog posts)
- Sunday is the least popular day
Visitors
Areas of interest
- The most popular browser was Firefox (65.64%) followed by Safari (12.42%) and Internet Explorer (12.17%)
- Out of the 12.17% IE users, 17.82% used IE6 (1,037)
- 3 users were using IE5.5
- The most popular OS was Windows (64.38%) followed by Mac (31.10%)
- 595 people visited my site on the iPhone, 124 on the iPod and 3 on the PS3
- The most popular resolution was 1280×800 (19.09%)
- 9.77% had a resolution of 1024×768 and 0.3% had a resolution of 800×600
Traffic sources
Areas of interest
- The top 10 keywords were:
- twitter themes
- lee munroe
- twitter theme
- twitter backgrounds
- twitter page design
- freelance web designer
- web design trends
- get more twitter followers
- twitter profile background
- call to action buttons
- 2 people arrived by searching for ‘the spank machine‘
- 1 person arrived by searching for ‘excited hot female‘
- Stumbleupon referred 3,676 people, closely followed with 3,564 from Twitter
- The top 10 referrers were:
- 6,979 visits came from Google, while only 58 from yahoo and 38 from msn
Content
Areas of interest
- The top 10 pages were:
- Generally, the top 10 landing pages were the same as the top 10 exit pages, which were the same as the top 10 visited pages (therefore my bounce rate isn’t very good)
Conclusion
So what does all this mean?
- Constantly writing useful blog posts on your site is a good idea
- Writing guest posts for other sites can be useful
- Being active on Twitter matters
- Posting blog posts on the weekend isn’t as effective as during the week
- There are people who still use IE6
- You can pretty much forget about having to design for 800×600 anymore. Most users have at least 1024×768 and higher resolutions
- Remember people will access your site on different platforms, including mobile/iPhone
- Submit your site & posts to social sites like Delicious and Stumbleupon
- Twitter is a hot search topic at the minute
Of course these conclusions are only drawn from my readers. Things may be different for your site depending on your target market.
What are your stats like? What’s the oddest thing someone has searched for to find your site? How many people use IE6? Please share below.
Written with love from Lee Munroe.
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May 18th 2009
Lee Evans says:
great stats analysis Lee.
it is interesting how much of an impact twitter has had on your traffic both through referrals and twitter related searches.
Great work.
May 18th 2009
Yaili says:
Thanks for posting this, Lee. It’s very helpful to analyze your stats frequently and see what may not be working and where you can improve your content, and it’s certainly great to see the stats a website that has as many visitors as yours. I may do the same someday, even though I don’t have this kind of traffic
(And 3 IE5.5 users?!)
May 18th 2009
Phil Thompson says:
It’s always interesting to see another website’s stats so thanks very much for sharing. Stumbleupon.com is one of my highest referrers also and it often provides very good traffic i.e. people who look at more than one page of content.
May 18th 2009
Dmitry says:
Wow, thank you for sharing! Some numbers are really surprising for me. For example I thought you’ll get much more from SM after guest post and mentions..
And I’m wondering how did you get so much traffic from wordpress.org? You’ve made a plugin? Or taking participation in different discussions?
P.S. “There are people who still use IE6″ – it’s our eternal damnation! And I think you’ll say this even 5 years after.. =(
May 18th 2009
Joe Scanlon says:
Great work, thanks for sharing.
May 19th 2009
Ryan Mawhinney says:
Hi, interesting blog topic there, decided to take a few notes from you and am going to make a real effort to update my blog every week as often as possible. Signed up to ’stumbleupon’ so hopefully shall give my website views a boost. Thanks
May 19th 2009
Matt says:
I did some work for a furniture company and there typical customer is 50+. IE6 hits weighed in at a hefty 17%. Researching your target audience and the technology they are likely to use is ESSENTIAL!
May 21st 2009
Michael Kozakewich says:
You should also point out that iPhones and the like have screens smaller than 800×600. How many 640×480 screens were there?
There’ll come a day when people will find this site by searching for ‘horse boners’. It’s happened before.
Also, 1280×800 is laptop screens, I just realized. I wonder if that means a fifth of your readers are using a laptop?
(I’d be interested to hear how many 1920×1200 screens you have coming here.)
May 22nd 2009
Daniel says:
Strangest search term – I have a client that strips hardwood floors, and had a testimonial on his site from someone named Candy. Coincidently, in our city we have a strip club called Candy’s. Someone typed in “Strippers Candy’s” and ended up on his testimonial page.
My guess is they didn’t find what they were looking for.
May 23rd 2009
Arie Putranto says:
Great stat lee. I wonder when will I got so many traffics across my site ..
May 23rd 2009
The Wee Guy says:
Lee
I draw different conclusions.
Sure you drive alot of traffic. But look at your bounce rate, average page view, time on site: 76%, 1.68 and 1.33.
You are attracting a bunch of low hanging fruit; those looking for “free stuff”.
There’s an expression that says “Just because I have heard of cancer, doesn’t mean I want it”
What’s the point of all that traffic with generating business enquiries, leads and new business ?
May 24th 2009
David Airey says:
The spank machine? Haha.
Cheers for the recent email, buddy. I’ll reply asap.
May 24th 2009
Lee says:
Thanks for the comments, glad the insight was interesting.
@Dmitry: Smashing Mag has sent a lot of traffic over the past few months, more so from the posts featuring my site. And the site is featured in the Wordpress gallery, hence the traffic from there http://wordpress.org/showcase/lee-munroe/
@Michael Kozakewich: 4,937 with 1920×1200 resolutions (10%) and only 3 using 640×480
@The Wee Guy: Agreed. Since my top referrers are stumble and twitter a lot of people arrive at the site, scan down the article and then leave, hence the high bounce rate. Business wise I think it helps to get your name out there. Each visit to your blog isn’t going to convert into leads but constantly producing useful content and getting people to your site I find helps to promote your name and service.
May 24th 2009
Andy Sowards says:
Great post Lee, I agree, Sundays BLOW for traffic lol. Wonder what everyone does on Sundays that is so far away from the internet? I love the random search terms, They deserve a collective post all their own LoL.
Keep up the good work bud!
June 6th 2009
Chris says:
Do you have server user stats as well as Google Analytics? I find Google only records around a third of the visitor numbers.
I have IE at 42%, Firefox 34%, Safari 17% on my blog and IE at 49%, Firefox 26%, Safari 19% on my main site.
Agree most traffic is through the week, and that goes for the 30+ sites I manage and is not affected by age or profile of user. People at work!
i always target client’s email newsletters just before lunchtime and towards the end of the week when people might be getting a little bored.
I used the browser size information to persuade several clients to go for new larger websites.
Interesting post! Chris
June 10th 2009
Lee says:
@Andy: Yeah, I suppose Sunday is ‘family day’ or ‘take a break’ day. Usually the girlfriend will make me stay off the laptop on Sundays (but still feel the need to sneak on when she leaves the room
@Chris: Yeah I have server stats, although the interface is ugly. Google does miss out on some stats so number wise it isn’t accurate but I find the share/percentages are still the same. Nice trick on the email targeting