TheGreenskin Analytics - 7 Months of Blogging | The Greenskin - Warhammer Online Blog, Videos, Guides, Webcomic & Podcast

TheGreenskin Analytics - 7 Months of Blogging

July 4, 2008 – 6:03 pm

This is a long one folks, but if you have any interest in the way blogging statistics are analyzed, I think it is well worth the read! Hopefully, you can learn from my experiences and take something away for your site. For everyone else (who isn’t a blogger), you can call me a giant nerd in the comments section!

I started The Greenskin in early November 2007, which means it’s been about seven months of blogging so far. I just noticed that we recently hit a nice milestone of 100,000+ page views, which made me want to dig a little deeper. Here’s what I found (slightly rounded numbers):

7 months of blogging
200 posts (blog entries) - 201 including this one!
110k page views
55k unique visitors
2717 comments/trackbacks
3800 views (best day ever)

From this, it can be determined that we have averaged:

0.95 posts per day
550 views per post
13.5 comments per post
2 pages viewed per unique visitor

Here are a few figures you might find interesting:

Google Analytics

This is the current timeline for my blog. As you can see, there have been some pretty big ups and downs, but overall, traffic has been steadily increasing (slowly but surely). I’m mainly happy about two things: 1) pages/visit and 2) average time on site. Pages per unique visitor means many people have found something else that caught their eye during their time here. An average time of nearly 2 minutes per visit means more people than not have probably come here with a purpose, rather than by accident (though I’m sure that is the main reason this number isn’t higher). You see a major drop down to zero today because Google Analytics is always a day behind in its reporting. It doesn’t actually have data for today yet, which is reducing these numbers slightly (but oh well)!

This pie chart represents the proportion of traffic sources to the site. As you can see, the majority of unique visitors come from referring sites. This really illustrates the importance of a strong network, and I want to thank all the sites who have linked to me these past several months! Without your support, the reach of this little blog wouldn’t extend very far at all! More on that later…

Our second largest traffic source is a wide range of search engines, but mostly Google (94%). If you play your cards right, Google will send you so much love, you won’t know what to do with it all! The people who visit your site from search engines probably got there because they had questions, hoping you would provide the answers. Once WAR launches, I think everyone will see a giant spike in search engine traffic! My general/WoW blog hosted on Wordpress still receives an average of 500 uniques per day purely from Google and I haven’t written on that site since launching this one. Good SEO (search engine optimization) + good content = good success with Google. I’m halfway there with Wordpress (excellent technical SEO under the hood) and hopefully we’re getting there with content!

Direct traffic comes from bookmarks or typing in thegreenskin.com directly into your address bar. No idea what “other” is! I’d like to analyze my Feedburner/RSS statistics but I’m not really familiar with the system. Any help on that would be appreciated (comment away)!

I could give a really detailed breakdown of daily and weekly traffic but I won’t because I think the monthly stats tell the best story. You can see that I peaked in January, which is due to the immense popularity of the 2007 Greeny Community Awards I was hosting. I was linked everywhere from guild forums to general forums to fansites and even from the WAR Herald.

The two following months saw a steep decline because there was simply no way for me to retain all the visitors I saw during the awards month. That said, it really helped gain the site some notoriety in the community and that was the best I could hope for!

The following three months saw a fairly steady increase in traffic, which I have to attribute to the wonderful help I received from several site contributors. NoneSuch helped develop the Greenskin Lore section, which is the most visited page on this site. Cicadymn (Sam) took over the Forum Watch feature because I just couldn’t keep up with it any more. It has become a fan favorite! Finally, Bo helped by pushing out some thought (and comment) provoking opinion pieces. Most recently, Rominus has been putting together one heck of a modelling guide, which I’m sure several thousand people will appreciate (even more) once the completed version hits the search engines! Thanks so much for your help guys!

You see a dip in the last month because it is July… this month! Already, by July 4th, we have more traffic than I did back in December of last year. That’s pretty impressive imho! I have no doubt this month will be even bigger than the last and continue it’s skyward reach.

Giving back some love

If you want to increase your traffice from referring sites, my advice to you, and I should partake in it more myself, is to do five main things: 1) comment on other blogs in your niche, especially ones that have a large audience; 2) join forums in your niche, put your site address in your signature, and become very active (but not trollish or spammy); 3) make personal connections (email/IM) with other fansite owners - they may be more willing to link to your content in the future; 4) submit your best entries to news portals; and 5) write the best, well-thought-out, well-edited, catchy posts you can - practice makes perfect!

These are the top 10 referring sites, according to Google Analytics:

Thanks for the love! I’d love to show more, but you have to cut it off somewhere, right!? As you can see, the list is a good mix of blogs, forums, news aggregators, and social networking site(s)! Expand your reach - expand your potential. Wow… that was almost Zen!

And finally, to the readers and commentors!

I want to thank each and every person who stops by this little corner of the WAR community and has a peek at what random thoughts are on our minds that day. I primarily write on this site as a creative outlet but it wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling if no-one was paying attention. Maybe that sounds egotistical? I guess, but it’s nice to stroke it once in a while! Uh, yeah… moving on.

I’m especially motivated by people who take the time to read through everything and leave thoughtful comments. Of the 2700ish so far, I have yet to come across once that needed heavy moderation or deletion, so I think it’s safe to say that Greenskin readers are highly intelligent, kind-hearted folk! I love a good debate as much as I love to hear affirmation that what I wrote was right on the money, so please leave a comment whenever you have the time and inclination!

It’s been an awesome seven months and the game hasn’t even launched yet. I can’t wait to see what’s on the horizon. I heard something inspiring by Garthilk during an unrecorded conversation for ChaosCast #3. He wrote up several design documents full of guiding principles for Warhammer Alliance. I’ve started working on a tiny one for The Greenskin that might help me keep things on track a little better (hello, webcomic?) as well as set a course for the future.

I hope you’ll be around to see it through with The Greenskin team.