November Blog Traffic Report

I’m not going to lie – I was convinced that November was going to be a bad blog traffic month for me. I had three guest posts, I had my infusion and was offline for almost a week, and there was Thanksgiving. Guest posts generally have a 50% chance of being good or terrible for your traffic, and in the beginning of the month, my traffic was low. But then things turned around halfway through November, and my traffic actually grew.

I have a few ideas of why this happened, but I’ll get to that at the end. First, let’s talk about the statistics.

All blog traffic reports

Traffic Report

Current Statistics

Unique Pageviews: 8463 (+14% from October, -15% from last year)

Bounce Rate: 12.22% (+16% from October, -66% from last year)

Session: 4092 (+12.5% from October, -12% from last year)

Users: 3109 (+18% from October, -21% from last year)

Bloglovin: 1770 (+0.16% from October, +3.6% from last year)

Email Subscribers: 327 (+6.5% from October, +41.5% from last year)

How I keep my bounce rate so low

Social Media

Facebook: 976 (+0.7% from October, +8% from last year)

Twitter: 3109 (+0.5% from October, +16.7% from last year)

Instagram: 2690 (+5.2% from October, +51.9% from last year)

Google+: 238 (+0.4% from October, +20% from last year)

Pinterest: 5519 (+1.4% from October, +41% from last year)

Tumblr: 3834 (+0.18% from October, +5% from last year)

Top Posts

1. Chronic Illness Hacks for the Holidays
2. Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
3. How To Talk about Your Chronic Illness
4. A Weekend in Boston
5. Top Drugstore Makeup
6. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
7. Endometriosis: The Disease Women Aren’t Talking About
8. Gift Guide: Cyber Monday
9. Questions Not To Ask Someone with a Chronic Illness
10. Tools for Pain Management That Aren’t Medication

Top Sources of Traffic

• Pinterest (47.16%) – Pinterest has consistently be one of my biggest sources of traffic. I focused on making blog images optimized for Pinterest back in January and I’ve kept with it. It clearly pays off.
• Twitter (9.14%) – Twitter is my favorite social media networks because words are my thing. Here is how to get more followers on Twitter and how to use Twitter as a blogger.
• Facebook (6.14%) – This is not surprising because I have my Facebook page and I promote my posts in Facebook groups for bloggers. I mention more about this is my post on how I promote my blog posts.
• Google (6.23%) – I love this! I try to have at least one post a week use SEO (search engine optimization), and it’s clearly paying off.

Note: I decided not to include the percentage that was direct traffic in here because that isn’t necessarily a “source” of traffic. However, if you would like me to mention what percentage of my traffic is direct, comment below and let me know!

Traffic Analysis

What I Did

• How I promote my blog posts – social media strategy included
• Updated old blog posts – This was my “big traffic tool” of the month. To be honest, I only kind of did this. It was easier said than done, so all I did was go back through old posts and update them with links to other posts. When I do this, I always make sure that I like to similar posts and not just random ones. I chose the posts that had gotten the most traffic over the past 6 months because I have 815 published posts; I’m not going to back to all of them. It’s kind of hard to tell if this what boosted my traffic, but I think that it’s probably one of the factors that helped.
• Started annual holiday gift guides – This definitely helped, especially my Cyber Monday gift guide. I can see why bloggers do posts about sales because even if the affiliate income from them is low, they can really boost your traffic. What helped in my case is I posted this the Friday before Cyber Monday, so I wasn’t one of a million bloggers posting it and it gave people a heads up of what sales were coming.
• Loop giveaway on Instagram – This boosted my Instagram followers, but since I did it with bloggers semi-similar to me, it didn’t majorly boost my followers. A lot of people who entered were already following me.
• I had my infusion and had 3 guest posts – Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, these things contributed to lower traffic. I wasn’t online much at all after my infusion. One thing that frustrated me was I didn’t post on Instagram for 2 days (only 2!) and the algorithm barely showed my next pictures to anyone. It took over a week for my engagement to go back up to the usual percentage.
• Thanksgiving happened – Americans were busy with their families, aka not online.

I Haven’t Seen Results From

• Nothing! I didn’t try to do too much this month because of everything going on personally (hello, infusion and finals), and the things I did try did bring me more traffic

What I Can Learn

• Every now and then, update old posts with links to other posts – This is super helpful even if you regularly link to other posts when you write them. For example, I wrote a post about what a millennial with arthritis wants you to know. Since then, I’ve written other posts about arthritis. I went back and added links to the more recent posts, which brings more traffic to those newer posts.
• Gift guides can bring traffic, but try to be original – I try to write gift guides for different types of people, or rather, different people’s interests. There are so many bloggers who write gift guides for her, but I write ones more about gift guides for bookworms. There are fewer bloggers writing posts about that, so it’s less likely that my readers have already read posts like it.

November Goals

• Maintain page views – Success!
• Maintain bounce rate lower than 20% – Success! My bounce rate did increase, but not by much, and it was already ridiculously low, so I’m not shocked that it grew. As long as it stays below 20%, I’m happy.
• 9-12 posts – Success!

December Goals

• Maintain page views
• Maintain bounce rate lower than 20%
• 9-11 posts – Because of finals and Christmas, I’m aiming a little bit lower in December.

What has helped grow your blog traffic?

Like this post? Check out:

All blog traffic reports, Why Social Media Matters for Bloggers (And How To Grow Yours!), How To Use Twitter As a Blogger + Free List of Things To Post, 8 Ways To Lower Your Bounce Rate