This, the first day of 2010, seems like a good point to recap some of the more technical statistics of Meandering Passage for 2009 and capture some of my thoughts on them.
Total 2009 Published Posts: 326 (6.27/week average)
My posting habits varied this year — some months I did very good posting and others, well..not so good. When I didn’t feel like it I didn’t post — you could probably graph my mood swings and health from the number of post each week/month. :-)
Total 2009 Visits: 230,138
This year marked a final transition from mostly computer (Mac) technical blog post to a nearly one hundred percent photo blog. Looking at the 2009 visitor trends my overall visitor numbers decreased about 20% from this switch but they are now more stable (daily) and don’t reflect the significant peaks and valleys the technical posts produced. The technical content generated these peaks due to posting about “hot” topics which draw a lot of search traffic for about one or two days and then fade away to nothing.
Total 2009 Pageviews: 282,378 (1.23 Pages/visit)
Not as high a ratio as I would like but with further analysis it does appear it’s increasing since switching to the photo blog theme. Increasing this ratio is a matter of quality content and site design — things to think about this year.
Traffic Sources:
- 50.51% Search Engines (Google 47.8% of the search engine traffic)
- 30.54% Direct Traffic
- 18.94% Referring Sites
- 00.11% Other
About normal, but I’ve gotten a little more search traffic from Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo this year. I did insure this year their search spiders are being pinged when I post new content so it gets indexed in their search databases. I’m looking at some other ways to “market” this site for 2010.
Visitor Locations (199 countries/territories total):
- 127,583 United States
- 25,025 Canada
- 11.529 United Kingdom
- 4,828 Spain
- 4,231 Netherlands
- 4,012 Australia
- 3,596 Germany
- 3,340 Taiwan
- 2,899 Moldova
- 2,517 Italy
It boggles my mind how many people in so many different countries have visited this site. The beauty of the Internet! I’m thankful and certainly appreciate every visit. Many of these visitors from other countries have good or some level of command of the English Language. I’m embarrassed my own lingual capabilities are so limited — I do use Google Translate to visit and follow a number of non-English language sites.
Visitor Browsers and OS:
- 50.79% Internet Explorer/Windows
- 16.89% Safari/Macintosh
- 14.36% Firefox/Windows
- 9.51% Firefox/Macintosh
- 3.11% Firefox/Linus
- 1.91% Chrome/Windows
- .61% Safari/iPhone
- .40% Safari/Windows
- .34% Mozilla/Linux
I guess with over 50% percent of my traffic being Internet Explorer on Windows I need to watch how badly I speak of “Windoze.” ;-)
Visitor Screen Resolutions:
- 90%+ 1152×864 or greater resolution
Good to know — my site is 1080 pixels wide which means that well over 90% of my visitors don’t need to scroll horizontally to view it.
Top Content (# of Pageviews in 2009):
- 34,314 – How to Install an Airport Extreme card in an Intel Mac Pro
- 20,272 – DD-Wrt Setting up a home Wireless Distribution System
- 10,517 – AL Powerbook G4 15 hard drive upgrade
- 9,703 – Linksys WRT54G firmware DD-Wrt upgrade
All technical articles written some time ago. Technical how-to articles have a long Internet shelf life and continue to draw large amounts of search engine traffic. This sets in motion some thoughts about future articles. ;-)
All-in-all a good year that hopefully will lead into a good 2010.
This month (January) I’ll be starting my fifth year publishing this blog — I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it’d last this long when I started it back in 2006. Happy 2010 everyone!
The photo is the historic Salisbury, NC, train station. This part of the station and the structure to the left are rented for special events such as weddings, receptions or large parties. This photo seemed right for this post as a place where there’s the symbolic arrival and departure of trains (years). :-)
I enjoy the deserted platform shot, but the detailed statistical report was very interesting and I enjoyed that thoroughly too. May 2010 be your best year yet!
Thanks, Don!
Wow! You had lots of visitors! My number of visitors totaled about 34,000 and some change. Of that, I had 65,000 page views. However, I am very pleased with the visitor loyalty. Most of my visitors, 75%+ are return visitors and my bounce rate is way down from 80% to about 60%.
I guess that in terms of goals, I’m not sure if having a fewer percentage of new visitors is a good thing or a bad thing. :-)
Hats off to you, my friend. Sounds like you had a very successful year!
Yea, youve got a better pageview per visit ratio which doesnt surprise me with your wonderful content. My bounce rate was over 90 percent last year but for 2009 it dropped to about 80%, so thats an improvement. My percentage of returning visitors is running about 45%. Most of the search traffic visitors for the older content never return after finding what theyve searched for.
I dont follow these statistics short term but over a longer period I think they can sometimes give indications of whats working or not working for the people who visit.
Paul, sounds like youve had a good year also and are aiming to hit this new one at full steam. I look forward to it! :-)
Happy New Year!
Yup, these are quite some numbers. Mine are very similar to Paul’s, though I have no whole-year statistics at the moment. I had 6000 visits in November and December, with a bounce rate of 73%. The real numbers will be a little worse, because I see about 100 views of “/outbound/article/www.youtube.com”, which only means that someone viewed a song video that I linked to. Apart from that, my lens review series about the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC drew a lot of the traffic. That’s in line with my past experience: make a Photoshop tutorial or write an equipment review, try to get some prominent links to it, and your traffic is secured :)
But then, why not? People search for content that matters to them. So do I.
Some write blogs based strictly upon what will draw traffic. I’ve had a couple of technical How-To post in the past that happen to be still popular but it wasn’t calculated on my part — simply luck. :-)
Interesting review of the statics, if you don’t mind in future post to discuss how you have marketed or will market your website, I would be very interested in learning from a pro. Happy New Year!
I’d be very interesting in learning from a “pro” also! ;-)
I’m sure that’s not me but I will happily share what I learn and do this year.
Earl, I look forward to reading Meandering Passage in the new year!
Thanks, Steve. I hope you’ll continue posting on “The Third Half of Life.” I enjoy reading those post as well.
Yes, also I am impressed by your visitor streams. I noted that for the first time a few weeks ago when looking at the view count on those technical posts you have on the front page. It was five figures, compared to the more normal 2 figures that I’m used to. :-)
Like a man lost in the woods, I’m not quite sure how my visitor numbers got to where they are. But, I’m sure luck was involved! ;-)
That’s really great Earl. I had about 23% Mac users in 2009 – a good sign! :-)