In an internal meeting yesterday, I expressed how excited I was that my blog traffic hit 92 earlier in the week. It was so exciting for me because not only am I a frustrated accountant who loves numbers, but I love web stats and understanding what drives people to sites. After this meeting, Greg Beazley sent an email to group of internal M&C people asking them to view and bookmark my site to see if there was any impact on the blog traffic.
The impact has been huge. Shortly after the email was sent, traffic spiked to just under 200 and overnight it peaked at just over 310 (see graphs below). The average views I was getting on the blog, before this email, was around 20 – 40 views a day, with a few spikes in traffic due to an AIMIA speaking engagement and an article. The ‘email’ experiment shows that internal emails sent advising of new campaigns do help to spike traffic, but something I’m interested in is seeing if the traffic continues or if it returns to the average levels (ie. how relevant was the content to the people who read it)
Blog traffic to this blog at 3.30pm, Tuesday 9 August
Blog traffic to this blog at 7.15am, Wednesday 10 August 2008
Over the weekend, I am going to try a few things to see if I can keep traffic above the average views:
- Allowing RSS feeds from the blog
- Adding social bookmarking icons
- Commenting on other blogs and referencing mine
- Add Google Analytics tags to understand the audience.
Thanks for helping build the learnings and stay tuned for more updates on traffic.
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September 10, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Aha! I knew it would work! I look forward to the updates of whether the traffic stayed strong.
September 11, 2008 at 8:08 am
Good work on the blog stats, did you know thta you have made it to the top 5 stories on http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/media/ so your traffic should spike up even more.
September 11, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Hey Dominique,
Great to see another industry blogger, especially someone of your standing. I am sure an RSS feeder will help your numbers but as you probably already know it will be a long term strategy.
I really like your Blogroll as well, it is a great resource.
September 11, 2008 at 11:37 pm
If you love things stats, and are looking at RSS, have a look at the offerings of Feedburner. I’ve recently stepped things up on our blog, so am deep in research mode on optimising and publicising our feeds, our content, and our use of social networking.
So, back to Feedburner – it has a very handy selection of add-ons, and being now under the umbrella of Google there should be some interesting things in the pipeline for the service.
September 12, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I’ve just noticed that our site’s in your blogroll Dominique. Small world(s).
September 13, 2008 at 10:47 am
As a recent graduate in advertising, I have to say that finding your blog through google alerts has been one of the most insightful pieces of work I have found. You offer great insight into all of the hot topics of advertising which is hard to find as outsider looking in.
Thank You for your contributions.