I set another traffic record for the blog in October, with 18,245 page views. I slipped past September’s total of 17,635 page views on the last afternoon of the month.
I don’t have as many observations on the record this time as I had about September’s record. But here are a few:
- It’s easier to set a record in October than in September, thanks to the extra day. I doubt if I’ll get another record in November, given the holiday and that it’s another 30-day month.
- Weekends don’t necessarily impact traffic. October had five weekends and September had four, so September actually had more non-weekend days, 22 to 21. My four slowest days in October, the only days with fewer than 300 views, were all on weekends. But I also had 916 views on Sunday, Oct. 16, the day I published the most-viewed post of the month. I also had good traffic the next weekend, 1,200-plus over the two days. I published my third most-viewed post of the month that Saturday. When I publish something good on the weekend, people find it.
- Similarly, evening posts can generate some evening traffic. I wasn’t able to post You can quote me on that and Our cheating culture until yesterday evening, but they still had 290 views (and several retweets) between them last night.
- Mystifyingly, searches for the 5 W’s continue to drive huge traffic for last April’s post The 5 W’s (and How) are even more important to business than to journalism. The post had only 344 views in April and less than that in May, June and July. But somehow it started showing up high in search results for the 5 W’s, and I’m amazed how often people (journalism students, I presume) search for the 5 W’s. Anyway, that post had its most traffic ever in October, with 800 views. It now has more than 3,000 total views, my fourth most-popular post ever. And, as I said last month, it seems mostly hollow traffic. No one’s commenting on the blog or blogging or tweeting about it, as people do when I write something they find engaging. At the risk of acting like a content farm (if you can do that on a blog with no ads), I might someday blog about the 5 W’s, in hopes of giving journalists (journalism students, I’m guessing) something more useful when they search for the term and find my blog.
- Twitter remains a big interest for people visiting my blog. My three most-viewed posts last month all related to Twitter: Advice for editors on becoming conversational on Twitter, Time for me to stop syncing Facebook with Twitter and How do you attract interested local followers on Twitter? And Advanced Twitter techniques for journalists ranked fifth, behind that 5 W’s ringer.
- Consistent posting drives traffic. I posted 19 times in October and 17 in September. Most of those posts didn’t get huge traffic. Only two posts topped 1,000 views and two more new posts topped 500. But everything except last month’s post about my traffic and a post yesterday about Newspaper Next topped 100 (and the N2 post will go over 100 before long). Posting consistently brings people back to my blog, too. Home page visits accounted for over 1,600 views.
- Make your archived content easy to find. Six old posts, in addition to the 5 W’s post, drew more than 200 hits each last month. Those are all posts designed to be useful over time, and I’m pleased that people are still finding them. (Unlike the 5 W’s post, I do occasionally get comments, tweets and blog links for some of those posts.)
OK, there’s another self-indulgent look at my traffic. It was the least-viewed post last month. Probably will be this month, too. But I still think it’s a good idea to look at my traffic patterns now and then and learn a few lessons.
Steve, I believe it very possible that you might prefer that I remain a watcher rather than a participant – and if that is or ever becomes the case, please just say the word.
In this case, I would like to urge both you and your readers to forget about the relatively meaningless “number of views” statistic. On TV news, do you know what gets the highest ratings (based on a very similar “number of viewers” statistic)? Basically it’s train wrecks (in the anthropomorphic sense as well as the literal sense) – much the same way that traffic slows to get an eyeful of recent automobile accidents.
Now if you’re getting paid by that number, then I suppose that you do want to get as many as you need to stay in business, but businesses whose only mission is to find train wrecks (e.g. focusing everything exclusively on the number of eyeballs) rather than finding substantive ways to provide ever-increasing value to the customers that are being served don’t stay in business as long or have as much lasting impact on the customer.
Assuming that additional (otherwise vacant) eyeballs is not something you really need to continue publishing on a no-cost blog – what objectives could you be tryng to achieve instead? I can think of a few, but let me posit that “number of retweets or reposts” might be a good metric indicating a sense of value and also some sense of likely growth in influence.
Is there a way to measure this? There are actually a great number of other, preferable metrics – one of which is to monitor alerts which let you know when references to your work appear on Twitter (eg Twilert) and/or the web (Google alert) instead. Increases in the extent people are publically willing to profess personal satisfaction with and/or an allegience to the concepts and/or methods you promote indicate a strong sense that you are keeping your current customers happy and likely to have the opportunity to serve many more over time.
Eyeballs are worth pennies at most and are fleeting at best, Steve – Retweets and re-posts are (as expressed in the commercials for the Discover credit card) – priceless. I would advocate that we all forget about measuring the speed at which the revolving door is rotating and focus on the number that remain inside.
Rick Mueller
http://www.linkedin.com/in/decisionscience
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Rick, I welcome your thoughtful comments. Please keep them coming. Eyeballs aren’t worth pennies on my blog. You don’t see any advertising here. And yes, I certainly value engagement more than traffic. That was why I described the many visits to my 5 W’s post as hollow, noting that no one’s commenting, linking or retweeting it.
But I am also not going to dismiss actual page views as meaningless. With a couple of exceptions (5 W’s most notably), the blog posts I have written that drew the most traffic were the ones that generated the most discussion, measured by links, mentions on other blogs, retweets and comments. I encourage development of more meaningful ways to measure digital performance. But I do think it’s good to learn what you can from even imperfect metrics.
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Steve, we are caught in a perpetual argument about pageviews with those who say they aren’t important, it’s all about growing audience and those who believe we need to increase pageviews. We have goals for content providers: 180,000 per month. Some do well with it, others don’t take the goal seriously, and then there’s everyone in between. My thought has been that while you can have a lot of pageviews –that does not necessarily equate to a high number of visitors, visits or unique visitors. But the probability of growing audience and increasing unique visitors and visits is better with trying to also increase pageviews. So, I’m in the increase pageviews camp because there’s a statistical/probability relation to growing visitors. confused? So am I. What do you think. It is important to grow pageviews? Why or why not?
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Paul, I answered this partially in my response to Rick. Pageviews are an imperfect metric, but not a worthless one. I am pleased when a blog post gets good exposure, but more pleased when it generates engagement (retweets, comments, links and mentions on other blogs). Of course, my free, ad-free WordPress blog is a different matter from a website that sells CPM-based ads. But even if pageviews are directly tied to revenue, I think you want to look to more important metrics: time on site, bounce rate, unique visitors, local visitors, etc.
I wish digital journalism had a perfect metric that told you how successful you’ve been. But it’s a lot like baseball: Batting average matters, but it’s not your only or best measure of a hitter.
OK, I’m using sports comparisons. Time to stop.
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