Google Analytics and AweStats are the programs I use when I want to look in detail at my website statistics. Woopra gives me a regular quickly accessed overview of blog stats as the program comes on my PC start up. The start of the new year seemed a good time to do some analysis on my stats and my blogging methods. I came out with some very useful information including some surprises. Hopefully this analysis will be of some use to you too, as an indication of areas that are worth concentrating efforts on.
I am a member of a lot of Social Networking sites, although my degree of participation varies a great deal. It tends to be based on which sites I enjoy, especially the social aspects, although these are also communities where readers are more likely to result. I know that I could be much more systematic and organized in how I expend my efforts online, rather than fluttering from place to place without prior planning or without following the planning. There are just too many sites to be successful as an online social butterfly – the wings are just not large enough, being a social Albatross would be preferable.
I know the theory behind SEO and increasing visitors but tend to lack in the implementation of it. Being a bit of a net junkie the time and effort requirements do get fulfilled but matters such as keyword analysis take a back seat I find this tedious, although I do tend to use openings that are hopefully Google Getters. This has become more automatic rather than thought out, although on writing the first sentence here I did have this in mind and reworked it.
To the stats themselves – I compared 2008 annual figures from Awe Stats and Google Analytics. Although there was a lot of variations in the two sets of figures, when I grouped the numbers and looked at them both in percentage terms there was much less variation. I split the figures into groupings based on the type of networking involved.
Entrecard (+ related sites) 15% – I expected these to represent a fairly large proportion although I don’t think they necessarily translate to readers and bring few comments. After initial enthusiasm I no longer spend much time with Entrecard.
Lists and Blogrolls – The vast majority of this 4% is made up of lists I have qualified for rather than blog submission sites – Top 100 and top 50 women Australian Bloggers, a Do Follow list. Sitehopping has brought a small but steady stream of traffic too. The the blog directory sites were not doing anything at all and by mid year I had removed all of these buttons. I had joined these sites when I first started blogging and before Social Networking sites had taken off.
The amount of visitors arriving from Social Networking sites surprised me, especially how many referrals Stumbleupon had sent, as you can see below:
Stumbleupon sent me 23,500 visitors last year even though none of the submitted posts received huge amounts of thumbs up – no “Digg” effects are apparent. Although I do send my posts to contacts via the SU toolbar occasionally, many more were reviewed and given thumbs up without this. I do not enjoy Digg and have not had any enthusiasm for doing what is needed to get a post rated highly there.
As SU took up such a large proportion I have analyzed the other Social Networking Sites on their own without SU.
Although I expected Twitter to do well, I was surprised to see Blog Catalog in second place and Technorati in third. Considering I have not participated in Blog Soldiers and the Good Blogs for months, and no longer have the widgets installed, they performed quite highly. I do not use Mixx a great deal so that figure is not a true reflection on how well it could do for others. Nuffnang Australia has so far proved excellent considering the short period of time I have been a member, although that could be initial enthusiasm that comes along with something new. It will be interesting to see what results arise being featured blogger of the month on Nuffnang. I am pleased that diigo did so well as it is my favorite bookmarking site, with good social networking features thrown in.
Zimbio, which is not included above as I did not consider it a networking site as such, brought me 9674 referrals over a short period of time for just one contribution; my Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images post.
I also had a closer look at which posts were the most popular. (Publishing links to older popular posts is always a good strategy, not only for newer readers who may have missed them the first time round but to increase the number of links within your site.
- New Rules for Domain Names
- Add Borders to Images
- Excellent Free Online Image Editing Tools
- Add Widget Ready Sidebars to WordPress Footers
- Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images
- Adding a Favicon to your Blog
These vary from the Most Popular Posts listed in the sidebar because of different time periods used but both show how popular the image posts were. I believe I managed to get in quickly with the Domain Name post and it was a subject that attracted a lot of interest… The fact that the Favicon tutorial did so well is related to the nature of blogs. There are many posts and static website articles on this topic but this was much more recent than the others. It would be an interesting exercise to write another post on the same subject perhaps later this year, I suspect this too would do well..
So what does all this mean for the year ahead? I will concentrate my social networking efforts on the sites that have been the most useful in terms of visitors and most satisfying in terms of connecting with people. I will make an effort to participate more in Mixx. The Scoutle widget will reluctantly be removed from my footer. The concept is good but it has not proved effective visitor wise and the widget often causes very slow page loading times. I am going to continue giving Google Friend Connect a try – the poor lonely contact widget, which I recently installed, will have to be moved – again because of page loading issues. Nuffnang has yet to produce any ads and the widget’s intrusive size still bugs me.
I will also find time to do the full blog redesign that I have intended to do for a year, which I subequently planned to complete by today; to be installed in replacement of my Christmas theme. Instead I just quickly changed the colors and removed the Christmas images.
I hope these figures give you some indication of the worth of sites in relation to bringing in readers as, having read what others recommend, I do not think they are particularly out of the ordinary. If your experiences differ I would be interested in hearing about them.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Wow cool statistics! Stumble upon gives a huge advantage. I have it installed but don’t really use it active! Guess I should!
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Yes do try to use it. I have come to rely on the SU toolbar too much maybe and stumble posts when friends sent them to me rather than thinking of doing so when I read a good post.
I’ve heard though that too much SU traffic can get you banned from Google Adsense
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Boris, why would Google Adsense not want StumbleUpon traffic? It seems that if enough people are Stumbling your page, it must be good.
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I think its because of the way it delivers the traffic, kinda of an “automated” style. But yeah I am not sure why it would be a cause for banning.
Till then,
Jean
Statistics is a grey serious lady whom we must trust.I wasn’t surprised about Twitter,it is still gaining popularity.
Statistics can be misleading too. If I had used less advanced blog stats that held less information the picture may have come out differently.
In these stats are you counting in the amount of time you have spent on each of the different sites? I mean it is great to see what the stats have been for the past year but if you can’t compare it to the “workload” you don’t know where you best spend your time.
I know it will probably be hard to measure the time spent (especially in retrospect) but that would make the picture complete.
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You are quite right. Although I mentioned some sites that I had not spent time on I did not talk about those I had. The answer is not much time at all.
For Stumble – I do not actively seek out sites to review – if I come across something interesting I will thumb up or review via the toolbar. I am sent something like 20 sites a week via the toolbar by friends.
BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog – after initially spending time adding friends I now rarely visit the sites but have their widges on my page. I suppose the initial efforts of building up contacts on these sites continue to pay dividends, but this was prior to 2008. People continue to request to be contacts.
I am not big in the Tweet department – I have occasional bursts and my blog posts are all automatically posted on there.
All my bookmarks go to diigo, although I used to use delicious exclusively. I visit the site only when I need to look something up.
Much more of my time is spent on visiting other blogs, reading and leaving comments.
Wow. Very surprised at the power of SU. I too have it installed but rarely use it. That will now change. I’ve been concentrating on Twitter mostly….
Very wide array of social sites that you get traffic from. Do you visit them all often, or is this coming from a bookmarking tool of some sort?
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Social Networking plays a huge role into bringing in new readers. I haven’t actually done much of those mentioned above. I think it’s better to try 1 or 2 as time goes by, to test them out. For me, I use entrecard to find new blogs to visit/comment; and forums to update myself while to know some bloggers. However, I do see there are needs to find more readers elsewhere. There’re still many I haven’t get in touch with, and perhaps 1 or 2 from the zillion populations outthere would appreciate what I have to offer. Thanks Sue for the stats. It reminded me the urgency to try while sitting there and being sceptic at some of them. ^^
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Thats great, i didn’t know stumbleupon was so sweet. i mean i like using it but i didn’t know it could be used for increasing traffic that much. nice post.
I’ll have to check some of those out methinks. Thanks for the info
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Stumbleupon can send you a TON of traffic, depending on the content. Some types of content do better on that site than others.
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I read this statistics only on your blog and found it rather original.It is repeated nowhere else.
Writing original content is a big challenge when blogging in an topic area that is well covered. I do try not to repeat things and am more than willing to provide links to good content elsewhere.
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Thanks for such statistic. I didn’t know “other social networking sites” so I’m checking them out now.
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What I love about StumbleUpon is that it just gives and gives. A typical traffic pattern is a big rush the first day followed by a trickle for awhile and then a secondary rush as some big stumbler hits it. Very steady flow of traffic.
This pattern was exactly my experience.
Minnesota Attorneys last blog post..Fair Labor Standards Act Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota
True. I was enthusiastic about Entrecard at first. I liked the idea of free advertising it offered, and of giving something back to blogs I visit. But now, I haven’t logged in in ages, and I guess I don’t really intend to anymore.
Excellent post with some very interesting stats. I’ve found that both StumbleUpon and Reddit have consistently been an excellent source of traffic. Digg can result in a tsunami of traffic if a story goes popular but that isn’t easy.
Colleagues tell me that Twitter is also good for traffic, but I haven’t investigated this fully myself.
Thanks again
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Hi Sue,
Happy New Year! Very interesting write up. I need to go an look at my stats now.
I haven’t particularly tried to get traffic from social networks, so I haven’t looked at it closely, but I do know that StumbleUpon was a clear winner in terms of referrers for me.
I’ve also had a couple of surges from DZone and Design Float. These may be worth you checking out, particularly Design Float – all of the posts in your Most Popular Post section would fit comfortably with their readership. DZone can be a harder nut to crack – while some web design / WordPress posts make it, it’s more focused on programming.
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Thank you so much Stephen. It is refreshing and very useful to get some this sort of advice. I will give Design Float a go and will consider DZone for some of the WordPress PHP posts I have planned.
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This is without a doubt the most in-depth look at social networking driving traffic I’ve ever read. Excellent Post! I’ve always had success with StumbleUpon as well.
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Wow, that is alot of visitors from Stumbleupon!
Thats about how many we got from Google last year, but it would be nice to get it from other places..
Andy
Thank you for sharing that stats.
It seems that I don’t pay enough attention to Stumbleupon.
For the moment the most rewarding social network for me was Digg. The next one was Jumptags while Stumbleupon was only the third.
I’ll do some more work with it.
The conclusion is that it is a good idea to focus on social networks, because it bring much of the readers. I am going to explore Stumbleupon deeper, and how I can use it the have more traffic. Thank for the informative post.
Wow, nice post, i didn’t realize you could get that much extra traffic from places like digg and the like. thanks for the info, i remember stumbleupon but wow?!?
Hi there, thanks for visiting my blog.
This is a really interesting post. Its all the ‘stuff’ I don’t bother about and wish someone would do for me. I thought I would only blog for a while as some form of therapy but a year later I post every other day.
I joined Blog Catalogue – it brings me visitors and in fact I have found my most loyal readers from there. I dont activley do anything much though. Entrecard – oh I use it in fits and starts. I have never been abe to drop enough cards and I think its a bit trashy to drop and run. I may be letting that slide.
My traffic is low in comparison to the number of comments I get. Really low in fact. I got stumbled the other day and all of a sudden there was a huge surge in traffic. It got me excited and I thought I better look into this network too. As for twitter, I dont have time.
Blogging and commenting take as much time as I am prepared to give. Anyway thanks for this and I will certianly be back. It was a truly refreshing post and great read!
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StumbleUpon can bring an initial surge in traffic when a page is first stumbled. If enough people Stumble it, the traffic will continue.
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Just wanted to ask did you promote your content in SU by yourself, asked your friends or just give it change to work by itself?
Sorry to ask a silly question, but what is SU?
Andy
Sorry just got it… been a real long day..
I am the pod that holds Dumb and Dumber
Interesting facts, analysis and well written Sue!
You might know I was a finalist in Weblog Award lately and my best supportive experience was Twitter and also that I made an Event in Facebook and invited all my around 800 friends.
Btw: Sorry I haven’t been around that much, but my back still hurt and its hard to type.
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It is going to be interesting to see where Twitter goes during the next year. Right now, I find the signal-to-noise ratio rather high with everybody twittering about what their dog had for breakfast and such.
SU can be a great source of untargeted traffic but it’s hard to get people to stop and visit your blog.
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This reinforces the fact that I need to move away from the cpanel/server AWstats!
I think the reason I like them is because they always overestimate the number of visitors to my site. It makes me feel better about myself!
It’s no surprise that you can get so much traffic from these social networks. I’m yet to get a profile on them and the only one I use at the moment is Facebook for personal use.
Whenever I’ve got stumbleupon visitors they have not been useful visits. The traffic is untargetted and didn’t convert.
Renny – Hope your back gets better soon!
Stan
Awesome info and stats.
I always knew diigo had potential.
Stumbleupon is king though.
Rob
Wow, very interesting report. I definitely will try to use Mixx more, based on your experience.
It seems like some of the newest ones are hot for awhile and then they fade a bit.
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It is nice to see what other websites have as successful traffic referrers. I know that depending on the type of site I have, some do better than others when it comes to the different social networking sites.
I guess the trick is to test and see what works, and from that data, focus your marketing efforts appropriately.
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Stumble get’s me a fair bit of traffic, but it never seems to convert. I got a nice boost from twitter once.
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Hi, thats great information collected .. I dont know about many of them..
thanks for the great information..
I’ve been using Stumble Upon for a while
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I too am SEO allergic and indifferent and this post shows me another way to expand my readership. Thanks.
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What about digg for traffic. I am suprised twitter is number one.
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If Squidoo can be considered a social network, we are getting a ton of traffic from Squidoo. We have a few hundred lenses, so we’ve built up quite a profile over there.
We are also doing well on other social networks, but Facebook seems to be our best shot at traffic. Because we are in real estate, and real estate is local, Facebook has been a perfect fit for us.
~ Colleen
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This was a wonderful post! very informative…found you on CMF so glad i did
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I started blogging about two years ago and it was a personal blog.. I just wrote and wrote – didn’t have any idea about social networking. If I read this during that time, I wouldn’t have spent months wondering why I only got two hits. LOL
This was a wonderful post! very informative…found you on CMF so glad i did
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I think there’s a tiny mistake. StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc are Social Bookmarking sites and not Social Networking sites. Sites like Facebook are social networking sites because it allow people to join communities and make new friends. That’s how the word “Network” come into play.
Sites like StumbleUpon have networking activities too. But it mainly focuses on bookmarking good sites and share with friends and members.
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Wow, excellent stats! I generally find that much of my traffic comes from Stumbleupon and word-of-mouth from other bloggers/customers. I’ll explore some of those SN sites you listed i more detail.
Awesome information!! Thanks for sharing. Social media is powerful then ever especially for real estate business now. If you also in real estate business cyberhomesblog.com got some good stuffs too.
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For us, Twitter is bringing the most readers. Probably due to the quickness and message is sent and received.
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Well since I’ve only tried Twitter, I’ll have to say twitter is the best
Great statistics and analysis here. To be honest, I haven’t really made much use of the opportunities available in social networking. Most of my traffic has come from advertising and SEO. But this post really drives home the importance of employing social networking techniques for traffic generation. It looks like Twitter is one of the major players here and it’s something I have been reading a lot about lately (but have been slow to get on the bandwagon). Thanks for this great post.
-Jeff
Greatt thanks for sharing
yes i agree with you
. thanks for this sharing
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that sure is a lot of readers if their coming from social bookmarking sites thats astounding their the google amongst all the other sites
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Wow – I can’t believe Stumbleupon is pulling 80%. We’ve been getting strong results from Facebook and Digg, but it really depends on which sites your market is using and what type of media they engage with. Thanks for the post.
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It’s great to see all the amounts of traffic that you are getting from the social networks, it gives me strength for the usage of the web 2.0!
Till then,
Jean
Here is a tip to boost your social networking traffic even further. Use Only Wire for each post. This will mass submit to a large number of Social Bookmark and Social Network sites. http://www.onlywire.com . There is also a toolbar for Only Wire and they are on version 2 of this capability. Big time saver.
?Great Post Thanx.
Thanks nice to see what actualy is getting traffic to some websites. Some of the sites are not worth the time because the traffic is low quality but you did list some great sites and ideas.
I think social network is great to get lots of traffic if we have good content.. great job sue.,:)
Great post
thank you man
very nice nan ibne
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I really think that the social networking sites are fantastic. I have no idea what young people did without them. Obviously they have their problems, but I think they offer so much scope and help a lot of businesses
Good post i wonder how the traffic compares to search engines. Are you getting more from social networks or search. I know that organic traffic is best and converts better than social networks.
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social networks good for a traffic, but also for backlinks
Some people do not like social networking sites considering it just a waste of time.May be because they have not tried it or may be because it requires a lot of time in building relationships with your readers on social networking sites.
Besides i would also advice you to use social bookmarking sites.Who knows you can get some readers from there too.For ex Jumptags.Just give it a try.
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I love the combined breakdown. Social networking sounds like a another great way to increase traffic. Thanks.
Nice post. I agree , social media sites is quite intersting way to increase traffic. Now only i am concentrating on twitters and facebook . But after reading your article i am very much eager to learn stumbleupon. Thanks for the post
Good survey of social networking site referral. Twitter is good social networking site.
Wow, thanks for providing this insight. There are so many social networking sites that I needed some help deciding which ones to spend more time on.
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As I can see the Stumbleupon is really number one social networking platform but as per my knowledge Twitter is always the Best!
Very interesting stats. Lots of work went into this post.
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Social Networking plays a huge role into bringing in new readers. I haven’t actually done much of those mentioned above. I think it’s better to try 1 or 2 as time goes by, to test them out. For me, I use entrecard to find new blogs to visit/comment; and forums to update myself while to know some bloggers. However, I do see there are needs to find more readers elsewhere. There’re still many I haven’t get in touch with, and perhaps 1 or 2 from the zillion populations outthere would appreciate what I have to offer. Thanks Sue for the stats. It reminded me the urgency to try while sitting there and being sceptic at some of them. ^^
I’m new to all this but want to setup my first blog soon so I intend on printing this out and adding it to my boxfile.
Sure! as I can see the Stumbleupon is really number one social networking platform but as per my knowledge Twitter is always the Best!
thanks good sharing
Wow good statistics! Stumble upon gives a huge advantage. I have installed it but don’t really use it active! I think I should!
Nice post. All very good points. I really enjoyed reading it )
thanks you very much for this aricle
Good info , Twitter rules for traffic.
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What do you think about advertising in social networks?
For me Twitter brings the most readers and I’m quite satisfied with the way it works!
I prefer to use Twitter – I can manage my account even when I haven’t my PC with me but have my mobile phone! It is convenient – really:)
Statistics is a grey serious lady whom we must trust.I wasn’t surprised about Twitter,it is still gaining popularity.
I prefer to use Twitter
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I do send my posts to contacts via the SU toolbar occasionally, many more were reviewed and given thumbs up without this. I do not enjoy Digg and have not had any enthusiasm for doing what is needed to get a post rated highly there.
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