Another month has come and gone, which means another blog traffic report. July was (hopefully) the last ridiculous medical month for a little bit, so considering I was out of commission for part of the month, I’m okay with the traffic. It isn’t my favorite, but I started moving in the right direction again at the end of the month, so hopefully August will be off to a great start.
Traffic Report
Current Statistics
Unique pageviews: 5,853 (-11% from June, -46% from last year)
Bounce rate: 56.27% (+2.6% from June, +723% from last year)
Sessions: 3,360 (-6% from June, -75% from last year)
Users: 2,874 (+11% from June, -40% from last year)
Bloglovin: 1751 (+0.2% from June, +2.6% from last year)
Email subscribers: 270 (+1.5% from June, +44.3% from last year)
Social Media
Facebook: 947 (+0.5% from June, +10.1% from last year)
Twitter: 2973 (+1.9% from June, +18.6% from last year)
Instagram: 2533 (-5% from June, +89.9% from last year)
Google+: 220 (+2.3% from June, +20.9% from last year)
Pinterest: 5110 (+2.9% from June, +62.9% from last year)
Tumblr: 3797 (+0.2% from June, +5.3% from last year)
Top Posts
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
- A Weekend in Boston
- What To Do in Boston This Summer
- A Letter to the Mom Who Yelled at Me on the Bus for My Disability
- Erin Condren: End-of-Year Review
- The 5 Books That changed My Life
- 30 Things about Living with POTS
- On Inspiration Porn
- 40 Blog Post Ideas
Top Sources of Traffic
- Pinterest – This is my number 1 source of traffic, which reinforces how important it is to have Pinterest-optimized images. I was already including that, and then I started really focusing on it back in January. It’s good to see that this pays off.
- Google – I make sure at least 1 post a month is set up for SEO, and it pays off with Google searches being the second top source of traffic.
- Twitter – I post my posts on Twitter more than any other social media network, and apparently people are clicking over from that.
- Facebook – This makes sense because a) I share my blog posts on my Facebook page and b) I’m a member of multiple blogger Facebook groups.
- Bloglovin – This makes the most sense, since many people read blogs from the platform Bloglovin.
Traffic Analysis
What I Did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Big thing this month: trying different types of posts (more fashion and controversial than usual)
- Did the free version of Helene’s secrets for a successful Instagram course
- Joined the Chronic Illness Bloggers group
- Changed the freebie in my Pinterest profile
- Added top bar for mailing list
- Added call to action in About page
- Changed the Instagram widget in my sidebar because the old one wasn’t updating
- Added call to action in my popular posts
- Offline for 4th of July and infusion
- Giveaway
I Haven’t Seen Results From
- Instagram course – I think this is just because the kind of things Helene was talking about are not things that will cause big changes immediately, so we will see how things change next month
- Adding call to action in popular posts – I literally did this on the 29th, so there was just not enough time to see things change. HOWEVER, I have seen more people sign up for my newsletter than usual since the 29th, but I’m not sure if that’s a permanent thing and won’t know for sure until more time has passed.
- Changing the freebie in my Pinterest profile
What I Can Learn from this Month
- The Chronic Illness Bloggers group is amazing. More people have been sharing my posts than usual, and it’s definitely from this group.
- Adding a bar at the top of the page for email sign-up (ft. freebie) can definitely help. Within 10 minutes of installing it, I was getting sign-ups.
- Writing different types of blog posts can boost your traffic. As mentioned above, my big blog traffic tool this month was writing different types of blog posts. I wrote a fashion post as well as a more controversial post (and I intended to make a YouTube video but life happened, so maybe this month), and both were some of the more popular posts written this month. However, the posts I wrote this month weren’t that much different from my usual posts, so if I want to explore this more, I need to get more out of my blogging comfort zone.
- (FYI, if you were wondering what has up with my big change from July 2016 to July 2017, last year was a big anomaly with a strange number of sessions that didn’t seem to match up with page views.)
Goals for July
- 7,000 monthly page views – Fail. With the 4th of July weekend, my pageviews were lower than usual at the beginning of the month and then they started to increase in the second half of the month.
- Bounce rate below 54% – Fail. Similarly, the bounce rate was high (not a good thing with bounce rate) at the beginning of the month and got lower in the second half.
- 9-12 posts – Successful! I posted 10 times + 1 guest post
Goals for August
- 7,000 monthly page views
- Bounce rate below 54%
- 9-12 posts
What has helped grow your blog traffic?
Like this post? Check out:
All blog traffic posts, 5 Most Amazing Blog Post Ideas To Bring You Traffic for Years, 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.
Leave a Reply