Google Analytics - Week 9 Overview

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As you can see, traffic this week has been a little disappointing with out any spikes or major events. Everyone has the occasional 'off week', but the question is:

What can be learnt from this uneventful week?
As usual there are a combination of factors that caused the events/'unevents'. The answer can be found in more wonderful graphs below.



All of the minuses and drops in referrals may look disheartening, but it is important to figure out why traffic has dropped, or at least not grown.

You can see that the greatest drop is from fewer people finding this site via Google using the keyword 'Wealthtoolbox'. A quick Google search of that keyword still reveals that this blog occupies the number 2 and 3 spots; so the cause is not SEO failure. The only possibility is that people have finally caught on to Wealthtoolbox being untrustworthy and so it is less popular, resulting in fewer people searching for it.

The decrease in the number of referral traffic also has a simple explanation. Last week I received a link from JohnChow.com for winning his 'Guess my february blog income' contest which gave me more referral traffic than usual. This week I have simply lost that advantage, sending referral traffic back to usual which gives a negative percentage on the charts.

I have not made any new posts about Wealthtoolbox,, Mylot
or SlashMySeach, which always send a decent amount of traffic. This is because there is simply not much more to say about any of those programs and I would rather focus on more interesting blog topics. Unfortunately it is harder to rank well for more general keywords and so this causes a further decrease in traffic; at least for a while until this blog ranks more highly for more competitive terms.

That’s all for this weeks overview. As I wrote in the Week 9 earnings reportAdSence earnings increased despite the decrease in traffic, so arguably the quality of traffic has been higher.

Google Analytics - Week 8 Overview

One week ago today I made the first Google Analytics Weekly Overview. During that week, the point of interested was SlashMySearch. This week has been busy as well, so keep reading to find out about this blog’s growth.
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Here is my traffic for the week. You can see it has increased nicely as the week went on, despite a little 'blip' in the middle. Buy what is the explanation for this relatively steady increase?



Well, this chart offers part of the explanation. The noticeable difference between this chart of referring sources and the usual one is the appearance of JohnChow.com. It has leapt onto the listings snatching third place provided 64 visits over just a couple of days. The reason for this was my winning of his 'Guess my income' contest, which got me a link from one of his blog posts.

SlashMySearch.com has provided me with 34 visits, which I acquired by posting in their forum and having this sites address in my signature. This was doubly good because I was earning real money while reading and posting in those forums. The same thing can happen for your site so join SlashMySearch here.

Just a quick word about Earners blog who are running a John Chow style 'review my blog and get a free linkback'. I though it would be worth a shot, and it was just about, with my review of Earners blog getting me 12 referrals.

I am also very thankful towards Million Dollar Journey and Making Money on the Web, which sent some traffic my way.



This chart reveals the other reason for my steady increase in traffic. It shows more impressive figures about SlashMySearch and how my two posts about it, SlashMySearch a trial run and SlayMySearch - In depth review and proof of payment have brought me significant amounts of traffic, (91 visitors). It is interesting to see that a lot of these top 10 posts are newer ones, so perhaps that indicates an increase in quality for readers and SEO of my posts.

That’s all for this week overview,

Coming up
- Brand new Cashcrate info.

so Stay tuned.

Google Analytics - Week 7 Overview

I previously promised to show you all how much traffic this site gets, and where it gets it from. I will do this every week, in the form of a Google Analytics Overview. I will do this by going through Google Analytics and picking out the most important graphs/charts and explaining them to you. The plan is, that I will become proud of these reports because they will be a way of boasting about all the traffic I get, which at the moment is not the case.... So why am I doing it so soon?

Because you love it!. I would love to see the traffic stats for the blogs I read, it would be fascinating and I am guessing you are the same. I also hope that it will catch on and I will be able to see the traffic stats of the blogs I read, not to mention that it helps me unravel things in my mind.

So lets get going!

You can click all the images to enlarge them.



This graph is of my traffic for the week. The Blue line is the number of unique visitors. You can see it hovers around the 100 mark for most of the week, starting at its lowest of 89 and moving on up to 157. I am obviously very happy with this increase, although I do not think it will last. I would say that my weakest post all week has been the one on the Text Link Ads Calculator. However that post was on Tuesday, not Wednesday, (when the traffic dropped). Perhaps it took a day to get listed by the search engines, who knows…

Wednesday had the post called Article Marketing is a Waste of Time? which I though was quite good (lol). Anyway, the internet does have its 'off days' when there is just less traffic due to chance... I may not know the reason for the decrease in traffic midweek, but I do know the cause of the increase. Read on to find out...



This is where it gets interesting. This screen shot shows the top 10 referring sources for this blog. What I first noticed when I saw this is that it is very different from usual and can be used to explain the sudden bloom in traffic over the last couple of days. Firstly, I normally only get a couple of referrals from Dotmyspot but this week I am in the featured sites list, which brought me more, so thanks Michael!

Secondly, Mylot referrals are much higher that usual, this is because I have been doing more posting there than usual to promote this blog and also SlashMySearch (as part of my experiment with it, which proved very effective, getting me 8 referrals over night :D). While messing around on the SlashMySearch forum, I did a little blog promotion, which as you can see got me 10 referrals. This leads me on nicely to the next chart...



This shows the content that has attracted the most visitors. Everything is pretty much as usual, apart from No.4. Can you guess what it is? Yes it's the SlashMySearch post! It all fits together!

So:

1. I discovered SlashMySearch and wrote a post about it, which was popular in the search engines because its a new program and there is very little competition, which brought me some traffic.
2. I promoted it in Mylot, which got me some traffic (and signups).
3. I also did more networking this week that usual. I actively commented on the blogs I read, many of the authors returned the favour or at least came for a visit.
4. The Z list has helped boost my Technorati ranking, bringing me slightly more traffic from there.
5. I am in the Dotmyspot featured blogs list, bring more traffic.
6. My earnings report was popular, people like to hear the grit and know the details.

Isn't it weird how it all fits together?

To end I will throw in this chart of my new vs. returning visitors.



This shows the balance I have. Returning visors read more and more actively participate, but first timers probably click more ads. I have happy with this ratio, the fairly large number of returning visitors shows I am not writing a load of crap, and the new ones show my SEO is going well.

I am interested to know your feedback on all this. Would you like a post like this every week? Or maybe every other week? It’s all done For you!