That is an excellent question that I asked myself and then scribbled down on a piece of paper, which I finally have gone and looked at.
The best tool that I have access to this type of data is Google Analytics (which is now hooked in with my Adsense account). Google Analytics gives lots of exciting info about your site, and my only problem is that I don’t reference it enough to figure out whether the changes I am making or the things I am trying are adding readership or not.
The actual data is as follows:
So what do we learn from this and all the work I have been doing with Social Media?
- Google seems to be giving me the most traffic right now, but I am unsure what Organic means. I assume it might mean searches, but you never know.
- The Canadian Capitalist is my second biggest referral site, which is also not surprising, given the site’s readership numbers.
- Stumbleupon is driving a lot of traffic to my site, but I had noticed that before, so no big surprise there, but pleasant to see as well.
- The big surprise was that Reddit was a big referral site. Everything I post there gets lost very quickly, inundated with negative comments and rarely has a score above 5, yet it supplies a lot of readers as well, so that is something to think about.
- All the other social media sites do not create much interest.
I now need to ask, am I doing this whole social media thing right? Maybe not, but I have had 1 or 2 posts go “viral” (for me) and get a lot of hits due to them being well exposed, so maybe that is how it all works?
I am open to any ideas or theories on this from my readers.
From what I understand;
Google organic is from normal google search results where they click to your site.
Google referral is from google.com (or google.ca) but your blog is listed under another site like a directory, local pages, or another website in the SERPS that has a link to yours in the google results.
As for social media, I think it’s more about building relationships and continuing your blog conversations in other channels. The visitors that “stumble” to your post are not staying long, not commenting, not subscribing to your RSS feed, and not clicking on your ads.
Even the visitors from Canadian Capitalist are not worth nearly as much as the link that he provides for your website, which will help you rank higher in google searches.
I haven’t been doing this for very long, but from everything I understand, you want your google organic searches to grow and make up close to 50% of your visits. This means concentrating more on SEO than social media.
OK, useful to know as well!
I think organic searches means that the person using google types:
Blogging Canada
or something and your blog comes up.
I think you’re doing the whole social media thing right!
You have 68% New visits, I would assume that people are returning to your page for more! (which is always good). And lots of people are reading your site from feedburner, that’s great!
We’re still in our infancy but we’re finding that a lot of the ranking lists and social media metrics are either ignoring us, haven’t rolled through our site yet, or we don’t know how to establish the right links to the appropriate lists. Sooo much to learn!
http://websitegrader.com/ It’s a better indicator than Google Page Rank out there.
And if you are on WordPress, there are plugins out there like Feed Stats, Site Stats and so on to help you see where the spikes are and from where.
Plus, in WordPress you can see actual pages that link to you and refer visitors to your site, so you can go and thank them.
For me, I think links from other blogs is #1, but for what you can control, tweeting works the best to get others to share your content.
All good points! Thanks!