I was looking over my statistics for the month and noticed something that probably wasn’t good. My unique visitors are about even with my pageviews the past week. This could be for a number of reasons but usually it only spells problems.
Here is why I believe it is a problem. Usually when people find my blog it is through the search engine, Digg, Stumbleupon, Plurk, and Twitter. It’s really hard to tell how bad this really is considering how people find my blog unless I would really look into great detail of my statistics or analyticals.
Here’s what could be happening:
Search engine- Search engine people usually find my blog by individual posts. It will not make them go to my main page but to the page of the post. Looking at the statistics, it is saying that these people are reading the article and then not going to another page.
Digg- This is just like the search engines. People come to my blog on the page of the posts and not on the front page.
StumbleUpon- Many people can find you by your own page on Stumbleupon and my homepage URL is on there. However, I noticed that a lot of people come to my blog by some of my posts that have been stumbled by other people. That means they’re only going to the page of the post and not the front page of my blog.
Plurk- People on here only go to the front page of my blog and I have got around 490 unique visitors. This could easily be one of the main reasons why my unique visitors is a little bit higher than page views. When they come to my front page they can read the articles without ever having to go to another page. So what I could work on is to try to get them to click on to other pages of my blog.
Twitter- The people on here that go to my blog are usually followers of My Twitter. This means they like what I do on Twitter and probably like my blog also. They probably already looked at my blog and enjoyed it so when I have a new post and automatically post it on Twitter, then they just go to that articles page. They have most likely read the other articles so they will not have to click to other pages. But this should only be counted as a pageview because they’ve already been on my blog before.
There are many ways this could be happening but my conclusion is that it is not a good thing. I need to find ways of keeping visitors on my blog longer so I’m not part of that statistic of people staying on a web site for only 10 seconds. It is a good thing that this happened because I did want to show you why this “Usually” isn’t good. This happened on my other blogs the first three months also but then after I had enough content and links on my blog people just continued to click on the other links.
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My name is Franklin Bishop and I'm an expert on Blogging, Social Media, and Internet Marketing. I started this blog to help people looking for information on those subjects.
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This happens to me with all my stumbleupon traffic. I too have to figure it out, or resign myself that it’s the nature of the beast. The average time spent on my site is over five minutes, with multiple page views. StumbleUpon? I’m lucky if I get a second.
With two of my blogs I used to get hits that would then quickly run off. After a while I started to write not only better articles and more of them, but I also wrote better titles. I’m not sure, but I am guessing that this has a lot to do with it. I also keep my sidebar fairly clean and the popular links clearly visible. I’m now down to a 57% and 64% bounce rate on the two sites. Not great, but better than the 80-90% I was seeing.
My third blog is another story. The first two blogs are things I am learning about (sustainability and teaching). Sustainability is important to me, but I’ve never pretended to be an expert. I’m learning a lot, but my lack of expertise comes across in the posts. I still get more traffic to this site than my other two combined and more repeat users as well.
Teaching is also important to me. It is my second career, but I will not finish school till next year, so I don’t have the expertise there either.
My third blog though, is a technology blog. It is only about a month and a half old. My first career was as a tech and later some programming. I now do freelance stuff to help pay my way through my masters program. I worked in the industry for more than a decade. I know what I’m talking about a lot more often and I am sure that shows. I had one stumble that I stumbled myself, got 2000+ hits off of it and <30% bounce rate. It was a well written article with a good title, a good catch paragraph, and it happened to be about stumble upon, so it was ripe for that site. I get an average of 43% bounce rate on it in the last month.
Unfortunately, I also don’t seem to have as many repeat visitors as I’d like, but I think that a major reason for this is that it is so new. I’m sure that as time goes on and people learn more about it, that my repeat traffic to this site will increase. And I am also sure that the traffic in general will out perform my other sites.
I’m not sure why your visitors are not sticking around. You seem to know what you are talking about. Perhaps it is because you have the entire blog on your front page. I find that when users don’t bounce that they go to my front page and no where else. I also have the entire entry on my front page. I’ve considered putting teasers on the front page, trying to push people further into the site, but I’m worried that they would then just leave because they can’t stay on one page. My plan is to have other areas of the site for them to explore and other tools for them to use. I just have to develop them in all my available free time.
Speaking of time. I’ve spent a lot of time on this site. I was just going to check my email and then write a couple entries, when I saw a message from you on entrecard and thought I’d stop in to say hi. Now I need to go and write a blog on my own site
Writer Dad- I know what you mean. I get a lot of stumble upon traffic but none of it ever stays. I’m actually getting a lot more traffic from twitter since I have figured it out even better. I’ll make sure to post on it in the coming days.
Jason-I loved your comment. It is always good to learn off other blogs so that you can use what you learned on your main one. Your balance rate is actually looking pretty good so in no time you shouldn’t have them on a problem with that. Thanks for being part of this blog.
“My unique visitors was more than my page views the past week.”
^^^^ = physically impossible, just to let you know
Unique people can’t visit a site but not contribute to pageviews, so they would at least have to be equal.
I think the more content you build up the better – and where the visitors come from matter too – I think for a blog to make money search engine traffic is very critical. Sites like SU don’t really bring the targeted visitors – just curious ones
Chelles last blog post..5 Ways to Change Someone
What was the average time people spent on your site? What benefit do you derive from people staying on your blog longer? I suppose that the more important metric would be how many of these visitors become *repeat* visitors.
This is an interesting topic that I have not read a lot about. It’ll be interesting to see and hear more about this from you and other bloggers. I’m kind of interested in what I should do if this would happen to my blog.