Glowleaf

I had a recent talk with an advertiser, who was interested in buying banner space on this blog. The discussion reminded me why I didn’t want to bother with individual advertisers in the first place. 

I was trying to tell him that my blog gets 400 uniques/day, and his argument against that was that my Alexa rank was not high enough, and that I was not getting that many visitors in reality. Here is my Alexa traffic rank, it is all public information anyway.

As I was saying, he claimed that a blog with a rank of 330.000 could not get so many visitors, and I was trying to explain to him, that despite the skewed Alexa data, the number you see there is the overall traffic rank. If you look at the bottom of the page, you will see a little graph that shows 65% of my visitors are from the US. And the chart right below that, shows my alexa traffic rank for the US, 73.000.

EDIT: Just to prove how irrelevant Alexa is, look at what Alexa shows as a relevant site to mine.

An analysis changes a lot depending on how you look at it. The pitfall here is when you look at the wrong kind of data. For example, people want to buy links from high PR posts omitting the new posts on authority blogs that are bound to get PR in a few weeks. Dumb, yes, but people do tend to think like that.

It is a good thing to check the numbers, but make sure you are looking at the right ones.

And now a fact I have wanted to point out for a long time: Google Analytics is scrubbing your data.

It really is. The analysis for glowleaf.net shows 1/10th of the visitors! That is a huge gap, it goes far from a simple discrepancy. Just to make sure, I used another 3rd party analytics script, and the data it showed were pretty much the same as my hosting tracking report. Losing 90% of my visitors is a crappy way to report my traffic…

Despite the crappy tracking, the Google Analytics tabs have a lot to tell me about my blog.

 

Traffic sources, all traffic sources:

 

The avg time on site column is what I see as the most important, and it is worth noting that a simple comment on bluehatseo gave me a loyal reader. 5 minutes on average for the majority of my visitors are enough for me.

Visitors, depth of visit:

 

Here we see that my readers are shallow diggers, with hardly more than one page visited on average.

Visitors, Loyalty:

 

This table on the contrary, shows us that half the visitors are repeat readers, with a nice percentage of ~20% coming back for more than 20 times. The information we derive from this table and the previous is that the shallow diggers we saw earlier are basically repeat visitors who stay updated on every post.

A thing we can do to fix that problem of shallow visitors, is to use plugins that show relevant posts etc.

Visitors, length of visit:

 

This table shows us something interesting. While 75% of the visitors barely skim the site (maybe its the big fat smileys on top that deter them, but who cares…) we have a loyal percentage of ~20% who are definately reading the posts, and when we factor in the repeat visits from the other tables, we see that they do so often.

Traffic sources, keywords:

 

I just had to write this, it is so funny that I cannot bear it! Average time on site 8+ minutes from the “wickedfire skittles” google search, making that keyword the biggest avg time on site on the keywords page…

All that data, gives me the information that 20% of my readers, that is 80 out of the 400 daily visitors, are my loyal readers, who keep coming back for more (no idea why…)

Sounds good enough for me. Now, where can I find an advertiser that will rent adspace based on 80 loyal uniques/day?

Screw that, I am just waiting for these guys to go live… (crappy anchor text courtesy of their non inclusion in their beta phase of my blog)

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