Happy May! I hope you all had a great April and are starting off May on the right foot. Per usual, it’s time for my April blog traffic report. I’m very happy with these results, and I hope that they can help give you ideas for growing your own blog. Without further ado, let’s talk numbers.
This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting Kate the (Almost) Great!
Traffic Report
Current Statistics
Unique Pageviews: 17308 (+19.65% from March, +182.21% from last year)
Bounce Rate: 12.46% (+11.05% from March, -77.9% from last year)
Sessions: 7975 (+18.23% from March, +126.57%from last year)
Users: 6971 (+24.26% from March, +141.12% from last year)
Bloglovin: 1822 (+0.44% from March, +4.77% from last year)
Email Subscribers: 433 (+9.89% from March, +71.14% from last year)
How I keep my bounce rate so low
Social Media
Facebook: 1009 (-0.5% from March, +8.26% from last year)
Twitter: 3265 (+1.20% from March, +13.52% from last year)
Instagram: 2645 (+0.11% from March, +18.93% from last year)
Google+: 246 (+0.40% from March, +18.84% from last year)
Pinterest: 5955 (+1.74% from March, +26.56% from last year)
Tumblr: 3862 (+0.20% from March, +3.51% from last year)
Top Posts
- The 5 Books That Changed My Life
- Hacks for Living with Chronic Conditions
- What It’s Like To Live with Pain for 15 Years
- 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
- My Sister Dressed Me for a Week
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- 2018 Recent Reads: January-March
- 31 Historical Fiction Novels To Take You Back in Time
- New England Trips This Spring and Summer
- 5 Items Every Immunosuppressed Person Needs
Top Sources of Traffic
- Pinterest (67.61%) – This is a lot, and it’s 17% more than it was in March. How did that happen? Two reasons: 1) I’m still repinning old posts, especially to group boards that I’ve joined since they were last shared and 2) I started using Tailwind Tribes. As best as I understand, this is basically like a group board, but in Tailwind. And on top of all of that, I treat Pinterest like a search engine because it is! So I prepare my pins for search engines when I schedule them. You can read more about how I do that here.
- Google (5.41%) – I’m definitely interested to see that Google brought me more traffic than Facebook! This might be the first time that has happened. Since I started really optimizing my blog for SEO, this has helped.
- Facebook (5.40%) – Since I’m a member of multiple Facebook groups for bloggers, I’m not surprised by this.
- Twitter (1.28%) – But I am surprised by this! Usually, Twitter brings in more traffic. I’m not entirely sure why it decreased to this little.
This list does not include direct traffic because that is not a source.
Traffic Analysis
What I Did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Big thing: Use more of my own photos and fewer stock images (And yes, I’m aware that this post uses stock images. Taking pictures with my camera is very difficult right now while I’m on crutches!)
- Guest posts the week of April 2 (surgery) and April 20-25 (infusion)
- Added my blog to blog directories
- Started using Tailwind Tribes
- Made pages for some of my freebies (separate from the posts they were originally in) and pinned them – This definitely helped grow my email list! I noticed a huge jump in subscribers when I started doing this.
- Changed the hashtags I use on Instagram and the times that I post – I started this towards the end of the month, so I’m not entirely clear if this is affecting anything, but I’ll keep it up for a while. Basically, I was using the same hashtags for every picture for months, with some minor adjusting depending on what the photo was. To get my photos in front of more/different people, I switched things up. I also went through and made notes of when people reacted the most to my photos so I can try to post at more ideal times.
- Attended HealtheVoices – This was a conference for online health advocates. I had a lot of fun and I met a lot of new people! This can mostly explain my Twitter followers increase.
I Haven’t Seen Results From
- Using my own photos – While I don’t think that this directly affected my blog traffic at all, it does take my blog to the next level, so I’ll keep doing this.
- Adding my blog to blog directories
What I Can Learn This Month
- Using Tailwind Tribes can definitely grow your pageviews.
- Just because something takes your blog to the next level doesn’t mean that it will help grow it.
April Goals
- 9-12 posts – Success!
- 12,000 pageviews – Success!
- 4,000 users – Success!
May Goals
- 9-12 posts
- 14,000 pageviews
- 4,000 users
What has helped grow your blog traffic?
Like this post? Check out:
All blog traffic reports, How To Optimize Your Social Media as a Blogger, 12 Blog Traffic Boosting Tools, 10 Things Every Blog Needs, Why an Editorial Calendar Is Worth the Time + 164 Blog Post Ideas
Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
[…] isn’t a secret that Pinterest can be awesome for your blog traffic. In fact, in April, 67.61% of my traffic came from Pinterest. Over 67%! That didn’t happen overnight; I’ve […]