Traffic Sources In The Past Week
I look at Google Analytics about once a week and this week I noticed some changes. Here are the top ten sources in the past week:
Delicious hasn't been among the top ten referrers in a very long time. Is it making a comeback?
Twitter, Techmeme, and Hacker News have been the top three after direct and google for a while now, but Twitter seems to be rising as re-tweeting is starting to really take off.
And Facebook has never been in the top ten.
It seems that status messages with links is starting to deliver significant traffic. That's a trend worth watching.
It would be great if other bloggers would post this information and we could share insights about what's working as traffic sources these days.
Comments (Archived):
I’m actually more interested in where your traffic *isn’t* coming from.HackerNews beating Friendfeed 3:1 and Twitter beating Friendfeed 7:1 suggests that my personal “eh” toward FF is not a solo “whatever”. Your ideas are definitely spreading, to the point where some of them hit me a half-dozen times. That they’re not spreading via FF as quickly as services which serve similar circles can’t be a good thing for FF.There are no other blogs in your top 10. Most are aggregators (google, hackernews, delicious, techmeme) and status networks (twitter, facebook, friendfeed), with what is likely iGoogle/GReader mixed in at #6. I wonder why that is. Do blogs not have the size to send you 500 visits in a week? Or do blogs not drive traffic to other blogs in this tech world of ours?
that’s a great question about blogs. if i look at my top 25 this week, there are three “blogs” in itall things D – 143 visits this weekAlley Insider – 118 visits this weekMarc Canter – 117 visits this weeki’ve noticed that the links on this blog at best will drive about a couple hundred clicks per day, so blogs can drive traffic but not at the scale that services designed to drive traffic (techmeme, hacker news, etc) can
I used to get distracted by that chart too (it’s the one Google puts on your Analytics dashboard homepage by default), but I’ve found the much more informative report is the one showing not just “how many” but “how many that cared” (i.e. they spent time to read something) and “how many that came back.” (i.e. return visitors) What I’ve found (with my blog) is that most of the social bookmarking sites (Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon) are “drive-by” visits, but the sites like Hacker News, Google organic search, Techmeme and even FriendFeed are the ones that deliver quality readers.
I suspect that Delicious may be benefiting from the data loss and subsequent shutdown of Ma.gnolia.
Interesting post. I too am getting more traffic from Twitter these days, since I started using it more. As of now I mainly use it to tweet interesting links, to tweet about my new blog posts, and to communicate with friends (not much of that last, still mainly use email and IM for that).Also, BTW, you said in an earlier post (a while back) that more traffic tends to come from referring sites, than from direct or other means. After reading that I monitored that point on my own site and blog and found it was the same for me.
I’m loving the Delicious plugin, and they have awesome support on the maillist which makes bugs go away quite fast during beta.That makes all the difference for me, and I think that’s the same way for many other people as well.Not sure yet how you make money with that, but it’s great value for users, one of the few things I am willing to pay for on the web if it becomes freemium.
Fred, i confirm you that on my blogs Twitter is a top 5 referrer as well as facebook (since i sync facebook status and Twitter). Interesting trend as you observed
Simplyhappynews recieves almost exactly 33% of its traffic via Search Engine [almost 100% is users searching for “happy news”], Referral & Direct.The leading referral sites are facebook, alltop & google reader.
forums, wikipedia, youtube are great traffic drivers for some of my blogs. i think facebook connect will make facebook an even greater source of referrals (though i still hate on facebook….asking for too much trust, not earning it. same problem as google, though google earns a lot more trust)economic armageddon is the wild card, as always. most social media companies are still in unstable territory and do not seem to be that concerned about macroeconomic conditions and how to hedge against macro risk.
Fred -There are a few questions that you didn’t ask (or provide information on) which I feel are more important:1 – What has been the delta in these traffic numbers? How have the delicious numbers varied over time i.e. does 530 represent a surge on or a drop by other sources?2 – Possibly more important – does it matter? How much time should someone spend thinking about something that represents ~ 2% of your traffic?3 – Is there anything that unites each of these various sources as having a common destination? For example, does all the delicious traffic go to one story on one specific topic that you’re not likely to post on again soon? If so, it could be an outlier event that isn’t worth tracking.http://spreadsheets.google….r.
I’ll dig deeper and see if I can get you answers
Hi Fred. Thanks for sharing these numbers.Re-tweet is definitely becoming more and more popular (to the point where our users forced us to build it in feedly mini). The facebook number is interesting. One question: do you know how these numbers compare to the number of people reading your content through an RSS reader? Thank you.
The google referrer #6 is google readerReader is about 50% of my feed subsBloglines, netvibes, and newsgator being the vast majority of the other halfAssuming they all drive similar click thrus, that should give you anapproximation
Safe bet: much of that direct traffic is Twitter from air apps, email, SMS