A serious blog is geared towards its audience. As a serious blogger, it is important you understand your audience, your readers.
Simple and free tools like Google Analytics, will give you heaps of figures, but how do you make sense out of all that? What do these figures mean and what can I do with this?

In this tutorial I use a practical case study to help you analyse your traffic and answer some basic questions:

• Analysing the traffic quantity: Where does my visitors’ traffic come from? How much traffic do I get from search engines and social bookmarking sites? Should I do efforts to increase that traffic? Why?
• Analysing the traffic quality: The difference between new visitors and returning visitors? Why should I turn an occasional visitor into a returning visitor? How much time do visitors spend on my blog, and why is that important?
• Concluding – How to get more quality traffic to my blog: What is the most effective way to find new and returning visitors for my blog? Should I spend more time on social bookmarking, on search engine optimization or on discussion forums to get new visitors?

Picture courtesy Walid Hassanein

A serious blog is geared towards its audience. As a serious blogger, it is important you understand your audience, your readers.
When I started blogging, I struggled to understand my blog traffic. Simple and free tools like Google Analytics, gave me heaps of figures and graphs, but it took me a while before I could recognize trends, and really understand the meaning behind the figures.

I’d like to share this experiences using a practical case study. I hope it helps you understand some basic questions:

“Who reads my blog? Where does this visitor ‘traffic’ come from? How many posts do they typically read? How do I group this traffic so I can see trends, and how can I turn new visitors into returning visitors?”

Analysing your traffic will help you writing posts in function of your audience. It helps you target your content’s promotion. Optimizing your time spent on non-core activities like social bookmarking sites, blog catalogs or forums, will free up time for what a serious blogger should do: write good content.

In the series “Understanding the traffic on your blog”, I will go through the different steps, using The Road to the Horizon – my personal blog – as a practical case study, so you see how easy an analysis is.

First things first: the background of the case study.

The Road to the Horizon is my first blog, running on Blogger. It is a non-profit blog, covering social issues, travel stories, aid topics and news clips. It has a broad audience. It makes a good sample case for the average non-profit blog, the type of blogs we are covering in BlogTips.

I started “The Road” two and a half years ago. It reached close to 300,000 visitors, an amount steadily increasing to about 15,000/month. It has a Google Pagerank of 6.

I post about once a day maximum, and am quite active on social bookmarking (like Reddit, Digg, Mixx,..), so-so active in discussion forums (about expat life, travel and blogging) and have joined social media like Facebook and Twitter only six months ago.

For the case study, I ran Google Analytics over the 30 month’s life span of my blog, and processed the data from the top 50 referral sites (sites which generate visitors) in a simple spreadsheet.

I will first give you the objective data analysis and then summarize a number of recommendations which you can use for your blog.

Question #1: Where does my traffic come from?

I have categorized all visitors into 7 main groups, according to the source of the traffic (where do visitors come from?):

1. Search engines: Google, Google Images, Google Answers, Yahoo, AOL, MSN
2. Social Bookmarking Sites: mostly Reddit, Digg, BoingBoing, Fark, Shoutwire, StumbleUpon, PopUrls and Instablogs
3. Direct Traffic: visitors who come onto my blog directly, without being referred by another site
4. Discussion Forums: for me, these are expat-blog, aidworkers.net, flyertalk, freeones, …
5. Blog Catalogs: Bloglines, blogcatalog,..
6. Social Media: Twitter and Facebook
7. Other blogs and websites: single blogs and individual websites with linking to my blog.

Each of these groups have very specific patterns for the visitors they generate, and they form the basis of this analysis.

First and probably the most important question: which of these groups generate the most traffic?

Visitor traffic by source

You immediately notice the majority of visitors come in via search engines and social bookmarking sites: 77% of my 300,000 visitors stumbled across my blog by coincidence. These are mostly first time visitors.

The second important figure is the direct traffic. These are my loyal readers, my returning visitors. They will come back to check for updates, and are the most active in commenting on posts. This is the social community created around this blog, the community every blogger dreams of, cherishes and beams with pride when this figure increases. For a blogger, this is your core audience.

While the traffic from discussion forums, other blogs, blog catalogs and social media only account for 8% of the traffic, we should not discard them purely on volume. There is some quality traffic in there. More on this in the next part in this series.

Note that, even though I have only been active on Facebook and Twitter, the social media traffic already represents 1% of my traffic, or about 3,000 visitors. Six months of Twittering/Facebooking underrepresents the traffic it can generate, as I explained in this post and in this simple case study.

Let’s have a closer look at the search engine traffic:

Search engine traffic on my blog

Need I to stress the important of spending some time on your blog’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Some very basic and simple tricks I explained as part of Five things to do after creating a new blog.
In that post, I also stressed the importance of using the Google Webmasters tool, to ensure the Google crawler discovers and displays the most relevant pieces of your blog.

This figure is no surprise to me, as my blog has a pagerank of 6, making it stick above the average blog. Pageranks are the single utmost important factor for search engine traffic. The higher your ranking, the more prominent your blog will appear in Google searches, and the more traffic you will get.

Pageranks are based on backlinks (links from other blogs and sites to yours), which “come” automatically if you write good content and if your blog is known. Often backlinks are generated through your readers’ community, readers who have their own blogs.
Two key tips on getting a high pagerank, is to write good original content (and this I will repeat over and over again), and to keep interacting with your readers and commenters. I will detail this more in depth in a future post.

People searching for images using Google Images represent 17% of all search engine traffic. They look for pictures and are usually not interested in reading stuff. And they rarely will. Still, it is “free traffic”. Even if 1 out of 1,000 image searchers actually reads stuff on my blog, and becomes a loyal reader, I would welcome that.
Of all the tips on how to attrack Google Image traffic, the most important is to include “alt” and “title” tags with relevant keywords in your <img> tag. A small and simple effort for a lot of traffic.

I have a low amount of traffic from Yahoo, as I refuse to pay to submit my site and only use their free services, I explained previously. As BlogTips concentrates on non-profit blogs, I am sure we can all use our money for better and more noble purposes.

A more detailed analysis of the social bookmarking traffic:

Visitors on my blog, coming from Social Bookmarking sites

I use all kinds of social bookmarking sites. Reddit, Shoutwire and StumbleUpon are by far the most successful in driving traffic to my blog. But that is for my type of blog, and the type of subjects I write about. You will have to find your niche in the Social Bookmarking world, and make optimum use of it.

While search engine traffic comes ‘as a bonus’, social bookmarking traffic involves hard work. You need to post some of your most relevant posts yourself and interact with the community you find on these bookmarking sites. I would also strongly suggest to make it easy for readers to bookmark your posts by including bookmarking service widgets, as I did here on BlogTips.

From time to time, a post is picked up by the masses and spreads like fire. When “a post goes viral”, the sky is the limit. On my personal blog this post was picked up by BoingBoing, one of the most popular (edited) social bookmarking sites, and accounts for about 15,000 visitors and almost ALL the traffic from BoingBoing.

An other post (which I wrote in five minutes by the way) went viral on Digg and generated about 6,000 visitors in two days. Apart from that, Digg does not account for much of my traffic. It seems most submitted sites disappear amongst the vast volume of posts submitted to Digg every day.

Summarizing: what have we learned so far?

1. Analysing your traffic is important to understand your traffic, and to decide where you need to spend your valuable time.
2. Search engines count for the majority of a blog’s traffic, so allocate some time for basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
3. Google outperforms any other search engine, so spend some time optimizing the Google crawler and your image tagging.
4. “Content is King”: good content will get you backlinks, increase your pageranking and return higher traffic from search engines
5. Social bookmarking sites are an important traffic source, but take more work.
6. The most useful social bookmarking site for me is Reddit.
7. The higher your direct traffic, the more successful your blog. And vice versa.
8. When using social bookmarking sites, there is a chance a post goes viral and the instant return is a gold mine.
9. Traffic volume is not the single most important factor in analysing your audience.

In Part 2 of this series, we will concentrate more on the quality rather than the quantity of traffic.
Check also the conclusions in this case study.

Picture courtesy Tom Foolery

In Part 1 of this series we concentrated on the quantity of your blog visitors. We used a case study based on the 300,000 visitors on The Road to the Horizon, my personal non-profit blog.

In Part 2, we will focus on the quality of your traffic: Based on the 7 main groups of traffic generators (Search engines, Social bookmarking sites, Direct traffic, Discussion forums, Blog catalogs, Social Media and other websites/blogs), what is the most valuable traffic? And where should we allocate more time on?

Where do most of the new visitors come from?

First and foremost, a repeat: As a blogger, your returning visitors are your most valuable resource. As a serious and target-oriented blogger, one of your main goals is to turn the occasional visitors, into returning visitors.

As we showed in the previous post, our case study blog had 15% of all traffic as returning visitors. So 85% of the 300,000 visitors are new visitors. Where do they come from?

New visitor traffic by source

This graph shows, for each traffic source, the amount of new visitors. So for example “.95″ means 95% new visitors and 5% repeat or “returning” visitors.

The largest source of new visitors are social bookmarking sites (95% new visitors, 5% repeat visitors), search engines (91% new, 9% repeats), and discussion forums (88% new, 12% repeats). These are the people we need to get interested in our blog, the ones we will need to baffle with the quality of our content, our website layout and the ease of navigation during their first visit. We need to turn these into our loyal visitors.

It is also significant to flip back to part 1 of this series to remember social bookmarking and search engine traffic accounts for 77% of the traffic on our blog, a huge market!

So.. the majority of visitors on our blog, are first time visitors, a lot of potential!

The visitors coming from social media sites (Twitter and Facebook in my case) are mostly frequent visitors (38% of them). This is no surprise as both for Twitter and Facebook, one automatically creates a social community of people one interacts with frequently, people with the same interest as you. As I post my blogpost updates on both Facebook and Twitter, members of that community frequently visit my blogposts through the links I place there.

No surprise neither that the direct traffic are mostly repeat visitors. They are my core readers community, who know my URL by heart, or have bookmarked it.

How much time do visitors spend on the blog?

Average time visitors spend on the blog, per visit (in seconds)

Here we come into the ‘quality’ aspect of blog traffic. This graph clearly shows that, for the main sources of new visitors, we have little time to convince them our blog is worth while reading.

Visitors coming in from social bookmarking sites are the most volatile, giving us 20 seconds before they are gone. Those directed by search engines spend an average of 56 seconds. That is 3x as much as Social bookmarking visitors. If anything, this shows that the SEO for this blog is done quite well: the search results give to the users relevant links. On the other hand, these figures encourage us to spend more time on giving meaningful titles to our posts in social bookmarking sites.

Of course, the people from our core readers’ community, coming in via direct traffic don’t spend the most time on our site: they type in the home page URL, read what is interesting, and after an average of one and a half minute, they are gone. No problem here.

The visitors referred by other websites – sites who link back to our blog- spend the most time on our blog. Clearly the ‘other’ blog got them interested enough to click on their link, so they spend the time, almost 2 minutes per visit, to actually read the content. One more reason to see these linkbacks as very valuable: people coming in through link backs are actually very interested in our content. Quality visits!

The biggest surprise to me, is the visitors discussion forums generate. I am not active in a lot of discussion forums. I have about 2-3 I post on regularly, either to comment or to refer to a post which might be interesting to the topic at hand. Clearly when well done, this can generate quality traffic: people who spend the time reading your contents.

Another surprise is the quality from blog catalogs, but here I think we have a particular case. Most traffic comes in from Blogcatalog.com who started a new social action section. This means most of the people I interact with over there, are also socially aware, and will find the topics on my blog more interesting. In general, however, blog catalogs generate little traffic, and low quality traffic. They are only good to get your blog known, when it is still fresh and new.

Which visitors actually read more than one page?

Page visits per type of visitors (in pages)

This graph shows the amount of pages an average visitor reads, according to the source of traffic. While at first impression, there is not much difference, remember that each visitor reads minimum one page: the “landing” or “entry” page. So the differences ARE significant:

Social bookmarking sites generate the type of visitor that comes in, and goes again. 10% reads anothere pages. This behaviour confirms what we found in the first graph (remember: they only stay about 20 seconds?): Low quality traffic.

We are quite a bit more successful with visitors coming in from search engines, blog catalogs and social media, where of the 100 visits, 30 other pages are read. This means these three types of traffic sources are important in turning an occasional visitor into a repeated visitor.

As search engines generate 39% percent of our traffic (see part I of this series) and of the 100 visits, 30 read another page. This shows a sign of interest, and an increased chance they will turn in to a loyal visitor. Rather surprising to me, as I thought search engine traffic was trashy. The figures proved me wrong.

This is once again a reminder of the importance of some basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase the quality of your blog’s visits through search engines, as briefly described in “Five things to do after creating a new blog”.

Clearly, amongst the most interested readers are our repeat visitors, our direct traffic, but look at those coming in via discussion forums and backlinks from other websites! Another proof of quality traffic from these sources.
You should be grateful for backlinks from other websites and blogs, and encourage people to link back to you. One simple way is to put a clear remark in your copy rights notice that you encourage people to use your content, as long as they link back!

But this graph also shows the quality of the traffic coming in from discussion forums: Once a visitor comes in from a forum, he or she will actually flip through the pages more than an average visitors.
As a blogger, I think we spend too little time in looking for discussion forums covering our interests, and we are not active enough on these forums. Or maybe we are too modest to point people to a related post on our blog? Do so! Quality traffic guaranteed…

A similar graph shows the “bounce rate”: how many people will come in on a link, read the page and then leave your site without reading one single other page?

Bounce rates per blog visit

While the previous graph showed how many pages are read per visit, this graph shows how many people read a page and ‘get out’. The lower this figure, the better: we want people to come in, and read at least one more page before going again. Preferably 3, 10, 100 other pages!

Once again, this graph shows the low quality visits from social bookmarking sites: only 7% of visitors referred to us by bookmarking sites go to another page before leaving the site.

Similarly, the highest quality traffic is from the direct traffic visitors and those coming in from discussion forums and other blogs/websites, confirming what we said before.

What have we learned now?

1. Most visitors on a blog are first time visitors and spend little time before making up their mind if they want to stay. The first impression of content, appearance and speed of your blog are important to convert them into returning visitors.
2. - Once again – the quality of the Search Engine Optimization is important to generate quality visitors coming from search engines.
3. Backlinks from other blogs and websites generate quality traffic, so encourage other blogs and websites to link back to you. Make it easy for them through a liberal copyright policy.
4. Discussion forum traffic is quality traffic. Invest time on forums, and don’t be shy to include a link back to your site for relevant content.
5. While the volume of traffic coming in from social bookmarking sites is very high, the quality is low. Make sure you have the right tools to publish a post to a bookmarking site easily and fast so you don’t spend much time on it. Put care in giving a good title and description to your bookmarked posts.
6. Unless if you find a blog catalog geared towards your interest, catalogs generate little traffic of low quality.

In the next post, we will draw our main conclusions.

Picture courtesy Shamus O’Reilly

Using an actual blog as a case study, we looked at the quantity of the traffic in Part 1 of this series. In Part 2, we zoomed in on the quality of the traffic.
In this post, we will summarize our conclusions and practical tips.

The bottom line

A blog, just like any website, has two main types of visitors:

• The new visitors
• The returning visitors

New visitors stumble upon your blog by coincidence. They are first time visitors, mostly as a freebie from social bookmarking sites and search engines.
These are the people browsing in a bookstore. They took out one of your books, look at the front and the back, and flip through some pages. If they are not interested, they will put your book back onto the shelf.

Returning visitors, shown as “direct traffic” in our case study, on the other hand, are your core audience. This is your gold, your market value. These are the people really interested in your blog, who come back to check for updates. Analysis shows they stay the longest, and read the most posts.
In the book story, those will buy your book and read it. If they are happy, they will go the store and buy your other books. And check regularly when you published your new best seller.

The art of writing a serious blog, is your ability to create this network, this virtual social community of loyal readers. The best way to do this, is to take this mass of ‘new visitors’, who just are ‘browsing around’ the Internet and stumble upon your blog by coincidence, and turn them into returning visitors.

About search engines and social bookmarking sites

As the statistics show: the majority of blog traffic (77% in our case study) are new visitors coming in from search engines and social bookmarking sites.
In just a few seconds, they will make up their mind, if they will put your blog ‘back on the book shelf’, or if they will flip through it. Within a few seconds, you will need to get them interested enough to browse through your posts, as if they were flipping through the pages of a book. And hook them. Get them to actually read further.
If you did not get them in 20 seconds (visitors from social bookmarking sites) or 56 seconds (visitors from search engines), they will be gone.

How you do that? Easy:

1. Write good quality and original content
2. Write even better content
3. Keep on working at improving your content
4. Ensure your blog loads fast, and has a good basic layout
5. Make sure people can navigate easily, can browse through your posts and search them
6. Implement basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to increase the quality of traffic coming in from search engines.

Discussion forums?

While rather limited in traffic quantity, the incoming traffic generated by discussion forums, is of high quality: If you select your discussion forums well, and contribute to good threads, interject links back to individual blogposts, these visitors will typically stay long, and read more then just the backlinked post.

Discussion forums are an underestimated source of traffic, so spend sufficient time on forums.

Backlinks from other blogs and individual websites…

… are not high in quantity, but high in quality. When a blog or a site links back to you, it is a vote of confidence for your blog. The referring site’s credibility will roll off onto you. And as an other website will only refer to you on topics they tackle, backlink traffic is a major candidate to be turned into loyal traffic on your blog.

Stimulate backlinks with a liberal copyright scheme, and maintain regular contact with those blogs linking back to you. A social community amongst bloggers is a strong source of feedback, support and… traffic.

Social Media

While in our case study, we were only active on Twitter and Facebook since six months, updating our social community on these social media with the newest blogposts, the traffic generated totalled already 1% (over a period of 30 months traffic on our blog).
The quality of the traffic is very high, though. So a social media are a definite MUST for a serious blogger.

And blog catalogs?

Unless if you find a blog catalog or blog directory specializing in the topics you write about, general blog catalogs don’t generate a lot of traffic, nor is the quality very high.
In general blog catalogs are only used to get a newly created blog some backlinks, and to get some initial traffic.

Interesting reading

- Watching blog traffic, the top 5 lessons so far

See Part 1 of this series for an analysis on quantity of traffic.
See Part 2, for a qualitative analysis.

Picture courtesy BestPicEver