I knew that school starting would cause some problems for my blog traffic. First of all, school comes first, work comes second, and blogging comes third. This means less time to write posts, less time to promote posts, and everything that goes along with that. Second of all, I don’t have a ton of energy when I’m not doing work things, whether that’s working at my job or my school work. That makes blogging hard.
But I wasn’t expecting to have so much trouble with my blog statistics. My pageviews dropped significantly. Was the two months of increased traffic a fluke, or was this month of decreased traffic a fluke? Did I do something that I’m not aware of that caused problems? I’m not sure. Anyway, check out the stats, what I did, and what I think may have caused problems. If you have any suggestions, please, please let me know.
Previous Blog Traffic Reports
Original Statistics
Traffic Report
Current Stats (October 1)
Unique Pageviews: 8,011 (+212% from the start, -31% from August)
Bounce Rate: 70.14% (-16% from the start, +447% from August)
Sessions: 4,997 (+78% from the start, +13.5% from August)
Users: 4,407 (+129% from the start, +19.7% from August)
Bloglovin: 1,498 (+.8% from August)
Email Subscribers: 56 (0 at the start, +7.7% from August)
Social Media
Facebook: 726 (+21% from the start, +0.4% from August)
Twitter: 1735 (+12% from the start, +1.3% from August)
Instagram: 882 (+120% from the start, +43.4% from August)
Google+: 123 (+46% from the start, +7.9% from August)
Pinterest: 1.6k (+75% from the start, +6.7% from August) These figures are approximates, as the only numbers I can see are 1.6k and 1.5k last month, so I don’t know the exact amounts.
Top Posts
- What I’ve Learned about Life From My Autoimmune Disease
- How Do Adults Celebrate Their Birthday?
- Is Arthritis a Big Deal?
- 40 Blog Post Ideas
- Need Grammar Help?
- Marketing Your Book As You Write It
- August Blog Traffic Report
- Take Action: Email the CDC
- Writing Papers for Any Class: A Teacher’s Tips
Traffic Analysis
What I Did:
- How I promote my blog posts
- Unfortunately, I’ve been having trouble sticking to this with my new schedule this month. I’m putting school first (for obvious reasons), and I think my blog traffic majorly suffered because of this. But more on that later.
- Deleted 101 in 1001 page
- Scheduled post promotions on Tumblr
- Promoted Pin about studying
- Boosted Facebook posts, but both times they were approved and then a few hours later rejected. I have no idea what’s going on – anyone else know?
- Pinned posts to my board for all blog posts
- Wrote a post about blog tips
- Didn’t do my Spoonie Spotlight series for a few weeks
What Worked:
Or, this month, what caused my pageviews to go in a downward spiral
- Deleted 101 in 1001 page
- Post calling people to email the CDC – could cause bounce rate
- Facebook ad problems
- Didn’t write as many blog posts, and not as many of the ones I did write were as high quality as they could have been
- No giveaways in September
I Haven’t Seen Results From:
This section is just making me sad. I am incredibly discouraged to see all the hard work that I’ve put in over the past 6 months since I started working towards this goal start to fall apart once school started. So we’re just going to skip this section this month.
Previous Goals:
- Pageviews: 15,000 – Obviously did not reach that. I’m so frustrated right now! I expected grad school to make blogging harder and I wasn’t sure if I was going to reach this goal, but going backwards by so much is just so incredibly frustrating.
- Unique Sessions: 6,000 – I got closer than I thought I would with how my pageviews decreased, but still didn’t make it. It looks like my sessions increased a little, but my bounce rate increased a TON, aka more people came to my blog, but significantly more only looked at one page before leaving.
- Instagram: 700 followers – FINALLY, some good news! I hit this goal out of the park with up to 882 followers. This happened because of a loop giveaway that I participated in. It was wonderful, but loop giveaways in the future probably will not become a regular thing for me. Besides, I apparently need to put more emphasis on this blog and my pageviews.
Plans and Goals:
- Increase pageviews back up to 10,000+
- Decrease bounce rate back down to below 50%
Okay, I need your help. Send me links to posts about increasing and maintaining pageviews or anything similar! It’s time to hunker down now that I’m settled in school and get this pageviews thing back where I want it.
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.
Seeing a dip in views is always discouraging, but I love your blog and know you will bounce back 🙂
Thank you so much! That kind of support means a lot to me 🙂
I just found your report on Pinterest – Do you automate you social media? I have a free 7 day course on how to do this. I would also suggest to invest in a software called boardboost OR tailwind to increase your traffic from Pinterest. Your content is good! Check me out – and my traffic/income report where I made $0.00 in September… I just launched my blog. Not worried. Keep going. You’re awesome
Thank you for the support! I actually do all of those things. My problem is that I do all the things that other people suggest. My statistics have finally (now) stopped dropping, and I think it may have been a software issue. But I’ll get into that on my next traffic report.
Hi Kate! I think your FB boost may have been rejected because there was too much text on the photo? If you have text on the photo covering more than 20% of the photo, it gets rejected. Hope that helps! Seeing this post late in October, so I’m hoping things have gotten better for you this month. 🙂
Don’t get frustrated! Just hang in there and keep at it. You’re talented and organised, you’ll make it!