February Blog Traffic Report

After The Never-Ending Month (January), February flew by. And now we’re in March! This will be a short month for me because my surgery is on the 15th and will then be on bedrest for the rest of the month. (Never fear – there will be guest posts here.) Check out my traffic and then what I did to get more of it, including the changes I made to my Instagram strategy.

Note: In order to compare statistics accurately, I’m looking at all of February and the last few days of January. This is because February is so much shorter than January.

All blog traffic reports

Blog Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Pageviews: 9441 (-16.2% from January, +19.8% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 13.98% (-3% from January, -74.3% from last year)

Sessions: 4257 (-23.3%% from January, -5.5% from last year)

Users: 3440 (-23.5% from January, -14.3% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1805 (+0.5% from January, +4.39% from last year)

Email Subscribers: 361 (+2.55% from January, +44.97% from last year)

How I keep my bounce rate so low

Social Media

Facebook: 1012 (+2.84% from January, +9.64% from last year)

Twitter: 3198 (+1.62% from January, +15.95% from last year)

Instagram: 2664 (+0.9% from January, +4.39% from last year)

Google+: 245 (-0.5% from January, +19.5% from last year)

Pinterest: 5728 (+1.07% from January, +30.83% from last year)

Tumblr: 3849 (+0.05% from January, +4.16% from last year)

Top Posts

1. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
2. A Weekend in Boston
3. 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
4. 5 Items Every Immunosuppressed Person Needs
5. How Do Adults Celebrate Their Birthday?
6. New England Trips this Spring & Summer
7. 40 Blog Post Ideas
8. The Best Fair Skin Makeup
9. 12 Blog Traffic Boosting Tools To Try in 2018
10. The Art of Managing Anxiety

Top Sources of Traffic

This does not include direct traffic.

• Pinterest (47.87%) – Given how much time I spend on optimizing my blog posts for Pinterest, I’m very pleased with this. I make Pinterest-friendly images that are larger than the ones in the posts themselves, I use SEO terms in my image names and descriptions, and I schedule pins to multiple boards.
• Facebook (9.25%) – This makes sense because I’m in many Facebook groups for bloggers, in addition to my Facebook page.
• Twitter (7.06%) – I promote my posts multiple times a day on Twitter, I tag retweet accounts in some of my promotional tweets, and I have the option for people to share my posts from the blog posts. This all helps me get this traffic!
• Google (6.29%) – Last month, I doubled down on using SEO in my posts. I have continued doing this in February, and it has helped.

Blog Traffic Analysis

What I Did: 

• How I promote my blog posts
• Focused on getting traffic from my Instagram – I want to be clear here: I did not focus on growing my Instagram but instead worked on getting traffic from my existing Instagram audience. I’ve decided to work on enjoying Instagram and focus less on growing because that makes it less fun. In order to do drive blog traffic, here’s what I did:
  • Tweaked my profile a bit – This was mostly because it used to mention that I’m a grad student and, as of December, I’m not anymore.
  • Signed up for Linktree – If you’re unfamiliar with it, this is a site that lets you include multiple links in your Instagram account. What you do is include your Linktree link in your profile and choose what sites you want to link to within that. I’ve decided on including a featured post (aka one that I really like), the newest post, my mailing list sign-up, my blogging resources, my email address, and my Twitter. What I really like is that it shows you the statistics of how many people have clicked each link.
  • Started pinning images from my Instagram – I started doing this because I needed quotes to pin to my boards and then kept doing it to drive more traffic to my Instagram and then (hopefully) the blog.
• Featured on a post in Boston Voyager
• Started repinning old posts

I Haven’t Seen Results From:

• Instagram – Whether or not this worked is actually questionable. I thought that it hadn’t done much (especially because it didn’t show up in my Google Analytics report), but I asked in my stories on Wednesday if people have gone to the blog because of a post and then if they have because of a story, and the result was a resounding “yes” to both. The best guess that I can come up with is that people are typing in the URL to go to the post and not necessarily going through the links. The one thing that gets in my way is that I don’t have the swipe up feature because I have fewer than 10,000 followers, so some people may have been interested in a post, but not enough to do the extra step of going to the blog or my profile.

What I Can Learn:

• Instagram can help build your brand overall, but not necessarily direct significant traffic unless you have a large following – Of course, I could be wrong about this. Like with all months, just because I move onto a new tool to try in March doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop using the tricks I used in February. If this changes, I will definitely let you guys know.

February Goals:

• 9-12 posts – Success!
• 9,000 pageviews – Success!
• 5,000 sessions – Nope.
• 4,000 users – Nope.

I’m not surprised by this because, as I mentioned in January’s blog traffic report, I gained a lot of traffic in January from one blog post, and I wasn’t sure how that would transfer over to February.

March Goals:

• 9-12 posts
• Maintain pageviews
• Maintain social media

Because I’m having surgery this month – March 15 – I’m not sure what this will do for my blog traffic. I’ll have posts for the first half of the month and then guest posts for after March 15. I’m also not sure how much I’ll be posting on social media. There will be scheduled posts on some networks, but not on others. We’ll have to wait and see!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve gotten about growing blog traffic?

Like this post? Check out:

All blog traffic reports, How To Use SEO To Stand Out + Free SEO Checklist, How To Optimize Your Social Media as a Blogger, 12 Blog Traffic Boosting Tools To Try in 2018, 10 Things Every Blog Needs