30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Day 2

Day 2's theme is "play in traffic". This is pretty easy for me because although I have only been writing this site for two years I have been blogging for six or seven years and have always used a site statistic analyzer on my blogs. In order to make this a true challenge I will use a new statistic service, Google Analytics. I have been signed up with them for some time, but don't use it. Here are my October stats from them:

• 9,475
Visits

• 6,677
Absolute Unique Visitors

• 22,489
Pageviews

• 2.37
Average Pageviews

• 00:02:41
Time on Site

• 60.99%
Bounce Rate

• 66.09%
New Visits

Not bad. More visitors that last month, 1/3 of visitors are returning visitors, 39% look at more than one page (that is what the 61% bounce rate is) and the average visitor stays about three minutes. I haven't really learned anything I didn't already know, so let me dig a little deeper into the stats.

The browser stats tell me 65% of my visitors use Internet Explorer (come on people, time to switch to Firefox!), 25% use Firefox and the rest use one of nine other browsers (I didn't know there were nine other browsers! This tells me I need to be sure to periodically checkout how my blog looks in Internet Explorer so I can maximize the experience of those visitors.

Meanwhile 85% of my visitors use some flavor of Windows, 14% use a Mac and the rest use one of eight other browsers (flavors of Linux, iPod and iPhone and Blackberry to name a few). Thus I need to check in with some of my Mac users and make sure the site is working for them the way it should (feel free to comment and let me know).

Nearly all of my visitors have their browsers set up in English, but I have visitors with browsers set to six other languages as well. Additionally my visitors come from 103 countries and territories, but most are from the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia (no surprise there, given I write in English). Perhaps I need to spent more time writing about special education in other countries to make my blog as well rounded as my visitors.

Vistors to the site came from 306 different sources. Most visitors 60% come to the site after using a search engine, but quite a few come directly by typing in the address or using a bookmark. The rest come through other blogs, chat groups, listservs, social bookmarking and e-mail sites. (I have noticed a huge spike in visitors everytime someone posts my site to a listserv like QIAT or the Boardmaker Group.) One interesting fact - more visitors come through an image search than a text search. I guess I better keep posting lots of images.

So there you have it, I have playe din traffic!