Thursday, January 1, 2009

Genea-Musings Traffic for 2008

I've been reporting on Genea-Musings traffic each quarter, more for my own edification, but if this interests you, please read on! My last report was for January through September, 2008.


I signed up for Google Analytics on January 4, 2008 in hopes of being able to gather more information about the site traffic. Here is a summary of daily visitors for 2008:






The statistics are:


* 50,867 Absolute Unique Visits (average 140 per day)
* 86,584 Visits (average 239 per day)
* 137,956 Page Views (average 380 per day)
* 1.59 Page Views per Visit
* 00:01:47 Average Time on Site
* 74.12% Bounce Rate
* 58.67% New visits.

The first two lines mean that 59% of my visitors never come back, and that an average of about 99 persons visit every day.

The bottom of the web page shows more charts and a list:







The statistics for "where did they come from" indicates:

* 42.12% from Search Engines (a link from a search engine)
* 34.21% Referring Sites (a link from another site)
* 23.58% Direct Traffic (a link from a Bookmark or Favorite, or typing an URL)

Where did these visitors come from? 129 Countries in all - the top 10 are: *

* United States - 70,953
* Canada - 5,162
* United Kingdom - 3,878
* Australia - 1,167
* Netherlands - 788
* Ireland - 752
* Germany - 407
* Israel - 292
* Norway - 262
* Finland - 256


Here is the Page View daily count:



Genea-musings "biggest hits" so far this year have been:




The "top 20" posts are:

1) World Records for Number of Children (posted 21 July 2006) - 5,820 views
2) John Tyler's Grandson is Still Alive (posted 20 February 2007) - 1,191 views
3) How Rare is Your Personality Type? (posted 20 June 2007) - 1,017 views
4) Sam Champion's Roots on ABCs Good Morning America (posted 2 November 2006) - 867 views
5) Family Tree Tattoos (posted 11 January 2007) - 839 views

6) 5 Year statistics for Ancestry.com Traffic (posted 25 March 2008) - 752 views
7) Yep, Barack Obama is My Cousin! (posted 12 February 2007) - 587 views
8) US City Directories (posted 16 September 2008 ) - 576 views
9) Pilgrim's Thanksgiving in 1621 (posted 22 November 2007) - 535 views
10) Genealogy Software Reviews (posted 2 January 2008) - 528 views

11) John McCain's Family Link to Robert the Bruce (posted 23 March 2008) - 507 views
12) Sarah Palin is My Cousin Too (posted 29 August 2008) - 491 views
13) "I Am My Own Grandpa" (posted 30 June 2006) - 469 views
14) Book Review "Google Your Family Tree" (posted 11 November 2008) - 449 views
15) Obtaining my Dad's WWII Service Record (posted 4 August 2006) - 435 views

16) VP Dick Cheney is My Cousin Too! (posted 19 October 2007) - 392 views
17) Was Daniel Boone an Ancestor of Pat Boone? (posted 31 August 2007) - 378 views
18) I'm Almost Ready to Cruise (posted 17 October 2008) - 354 views
20) Is This My New Genealogy File System? (posted 6 October 2008) - 334 views

My observation based on the hit list is that no one is really interested in my opinions on genealogy articles or web sites or my own family history posts, except for those about entertainment and political figures. Also, only seven of the top 20 posts are from 2008.

Quite a bit of the traffic in this period comes from Google (or other) search engine queries. Oh well...

By the way, this is post 2,495 of Genea-Musings - in 32.5 months (over 76 posts per month, about 2.5 posts per day on average).

There are more people reading Genea-Musings than just the ones noted above, which come via a link or an URL - the statistics above do not count RSS feeds (e.g., Feedburner (about 195 subscribers), Google Reader, Yahoo Reader, etc.). I am not sure if the stats count Bloglines (perhaps 55 subscribers) or not (I think so?).

These readers are probably 100% genealogy devotees, unlike a majority of my visitors to the URL that come via a search engine.

To all of my readers - Thank You for visiting and reading. I hope you learn something about genealogy and have a chuckle once in awhile.

1 comment:

Terry Thornton said...

Randy, Congratulations on such good traffic reports. "Build it and they will come" --- and you have built an excellent site. You're not called the King of the geneaBloggers without reason!

Happy New Year!
Terry Thornton
Fulton, Mississippi