Thursday, October 16, 2008

Genea-Musings traffic report - January through September 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 June, 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 the first nine months of 2008:


The graph above is for Page Views - how many times people landed on one of my web pages. As you can see, I average about 350 page views, with peaks at certain times (usually when another blogger or web site links to a post of mine). Traffic has been pretty steady, although there was a dip in Page Views in the spring of 2008.

The statistics are:

* 33,186 Absolute Unique Visits (average 123 per day)
* 58,817 Visits (average 218 per day)
* 94,879 Page Views (average 351 per day)
* 1.61 PageViews per Visit
* 00:01:51 Average Time on Site
* 73.52% Bounce Rate
* 56.32% New visits.

The first two lines mean that 56% of my visitors never come back, and that an average of about 95 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:

* 37.64% from Search Engines (a link from a search engine)

* 36.15% Referring Sites (a link from another site)

* 26.15% 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 - 48,330
* Canada - 3,498
* United Kingdom - 2,577
* Australia - 700
* Netherlands - 537
* Ireland - 566
* Israel - 215
* Germany - 233
* Norway - 197
* Finland - 191

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) - 3,950 views

2) 5 Year statistics for Ancestry.com Traffic (posted 25 March 2008) - 722 views

3) John Tyler's Grandson is Still Alive (posted 20 February 2007) - 800 views

4) Family Tree Tattoos (posted 11 January 2007) - 708 views

5) Make Your Own Gravestone (posted 29 July 2007) - 683 views

6) Sam Champion's Roots on ABCs Good Morning America (posted 2 November 2006) - 639 views

7) How Rare is Your Personality Type? (posted 20 June 2007) - 624 views

8) Genealogy Software Reviews (posted 2 January 2008) - 445 views

9) "I Am My Own Grandpa" (posted 30 June 2006) - 367 views

10) John McCain's Family Link to Robert the Bruce (posted 23 March 2008) - 355 views

11) Sarah Palin is My Cousin Too (posted 29 August 2008) - 320 views

12) Yep, Barack Obama is My Cousin! (posted 12 February 2007) - 312 views

13) VP Dick Cheney is My Cousin Too! (posted 19 October 2007) - 309 views

14) Was Daniel Boone an Ancestor of Pat Boone? (posted 31 August 2007) - 265 views

15) WW2 Young American Patriots (1941-1945) Database on Ancestry (posted 5 June 2006) - 258 views

16) Obtaining my Dad's WWII Service Record (posted 4 August 2006) - 256 views

17) Smithsonian mag cover: "Why Genealogy is Bunk" (posted 25 June 2007) - 255 views

18) Rootsweb to be in Ancestry domain (posted 14 March 2008) - 243 views

19) Does any Genealogy software do this? - Post 1 (posted 10 June 2008) - 241 views

20) Indexing Periodicals, Manuscripts, Collections, etc. (posted 22 July 2008) - 240 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, there are few posts 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 2,302 of Genea-Musings - in 30 months (over 77 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 185 subscribers), Google Reader, Yahoo Reader, etc.). I am not sure if the stats count Bloglines (perhaps 53 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:

Lynn said...

Hey Randy - I check your site everyday. I have it bookmarked! I quite often learn new things or get new ideas from your posts, and I often look at other genealogy blogs based on your comments about them. Keep up the good work you are doing with this blog!