Traffic Growth #8 - Growth Through FriendFeed
This was supposed to be a more active week both blogging and networking. Then the computer needed a reformat. And then the external hard drive with all my backups died. So I pretty much lost everything and have spent the last three days trying to piece back together as much as I could. It’s been joyful.
That being said, I’ve still been able to develop some useful analysis. Particular trends are the continuing development of FriendFeed traffic, and an improvement in overall bounce rates. I touched on the growth of FriendFeed related traffic last week, but it’s been increasingly noticeable even in a week of low activity.
If it hadn’t been for FriendFeed…
Numbers would have been a big chunk lower. FriendFeed made up 20% of all visits to Fog of Eternity in the last week. Now it was a low activity week to be sure, but it was second only to StumbleUpon as a traffic source. The traffic also tends to remain on the site longer and bounce less than StumbleUpon.
Not that bounce rates from FriendFeed visits are wonderful, still hitting the 80% mark. But visitors do spend an average of about a minute on the site, which suggests they’re at least taking a moment or two to read. I imagine these stats could be easily improved on a more active week, with livelier conversation and more regular new content on the site.
FriendFeed is also acting as an effective driver for repeat traffic. Just under a quarter of FriendFeed traffic is repeat visits. That’s a higher proportion than any other traffic source and suggests to me that FriendFeed acts as an excellent method of keeping people interested.
Variable bounce rates by article
Bounce rates on the site are down generally. Even StumbleUpon bounce rates dipped below 90% this week, which was pleasing. But I was equally curious to note the big discrepancies in bounce rate from article to article.
It doesn’t appear to be random though. I had a look at the different bounces from the different articles, and came to the conclusion that there are three types of article common on the site.
The traffic growth series
Has a surprisingly high level of new visitors. I’d imagined that it might be something that would be bringing in return readers more. It also has high bounce rates, ranging from the upper 80% levels and higher.
Reviews, lists, social networking “staples”
The kind of posts that are often listed in “101 posts for when you have writers block”. Reviews of applications or services, lists of good blogs, etc. These have high bounce rates - perhaps because people think they’ve seen it all before.
Comment and opinion
The highest traffic in general and, when not overly influenced by StumbleUpon spikes, easily the lowest bounce rates. These are also the articles that tend to have the most original (and often least SEO friendly) titles. But if the title is the first thing people see, then something original or confrontational is likely to catch their interest more.
Getting a handle on this analysis
So we’re two months into the traffic growth series. In that time, assuming an active week of at least five or six posts, traffic has definitely increased. And the traffic comes from a much wider base of traffic sources (even if I killed Google temporarily by migrating to WordPress). What were previously busy weeks now look very quiet - like this week - when we’ve enjoyed days with more than 2,000 visitors.
I feel more comfortable now in understanding the traffic trends, and more critical of traffic levels vs traffic quality. I hope that this is starting to show through in these articles. Remember, we were starting from scratch on the traffic growth and social networking just eight weeks ago!
None of which should suggest I plan to stop the series any time soon. I’m still getting a handle on lots of aspects of traffic growth and viral networking.
Leave a Reply