Traffic Growth #3 - Growth From Social Networking | Fog of Eternity

Traffic Growth #3 - Growth From Social Networking

I think this week has demonstrated that I was speaking much too early when I identified flaws in some social networking sites as traffic drivers. This week has seen a significant increase in overall traffic to the site. There have been noticeable spikes when content has been stumbled or submitted to more niche sites such as Sphinn. And while I haven’t had as much opportunity this week to heavily comment on other blogs, new and previous comments continue to drive traffic.

Daily traffic

Traffic Numbers Increasing

Analysis based simply on day to day visitor figures becomes more difficult now that spiking traffic makes the numbers less consistent. That being said, the visitor figures you can see do show a general traffic improvement on what might be called the “slow” days. What might be called “residual” traffic has increased to around 35-45 on weekdays and over 20 on weekends, which is definitely a consistent increase.

Those increases initially suggested to me an increase in return visitors, though Google Analytics figures don’t actually bear that out. That being said, it’s only recently that I remembered to configure Google Analytics to stop logging my IP as a visitor, and that presumably boosted past “return visitor” figures! There has however been a general increase in google searches bringing traffic, and I notice that the PageRank of the site has increased.

Google search visitors

The site also appears to be getting its single blog posts appearing on Google quicker - I don’t know if that’s in any way related to its PageRank. And certainly the tutorials in particular are a solid way of picking up traffic. While the Google searches are increasing I don’t think that’s as a result of any of the study of keyword data I did a while back, and subsequent changes. But it does demonstrate the overall benefit of semantically correct websites with regularly updated content.

Quantity and some quality, social networking sites

The big spikes this week came from two social networking sites, StumbleUpon and Sphinn, both for my post on social networking tools.

Most visited pages

The vast majority of this traffic comes from StumbleUpon, but the higher quality traffic definitely comes from Sphinn. Because of the StumbleUpon toolbar and also the more random nature of browsing through that medium, the majority of visitors obviously merely “stumble through” and click on to the next site. So they significantly reduce the average visit time and few of them pass on to view other pages rather than the initial stumble.

Traffic from Sphinn is much less in quantity, but visitors tend to spend time reading the initial article they’ve linked to, and then to visit other areas of the site as well. They behave in a similar way to visitors who are linking back to the site directly from a blog comment, who also act as far higher “value” visitors than the majority of StumbleUpon.

This is not a criticism of StumbleUpon, it’s simply providing less targetted visitors in the first place, but doing so in such high numbers that a much smaller conversion rate still adds to numbers examining the site in more detail, and possibly subscribing to RSS feeds and similar. But it does very much demonstrate the worthwhile nature of the more niche-focused social networking sites. Of the sites I mentioned in last week’s post, Sphinn is definitely the one I’ve been most impressed with and used regularly.

Conclusions

Even at this early stage in development it’s becoming possible to see trends, in organic growth through greater Google presence and increases in visitor numbers provoked by blog commenting and social networking.

Next week I’m going to continue to be active on the likes of Sphinn and also examine the take up of RSS feeds for the site. I also think that I’ll start incorporating more Google Analytics into the discussion as a comparison to the statistics from Performancing.