January Blog Traffic Report

I’ve talked a lot in my traffic reports about different ways to increase blog traffic. Some have been successful, but some have not.

All Traffic Reports

Original Statistics

Traffic Report

Current Statistics (January 1-31)

Unique Pageviews: 10,159 ( +169% from the start, +128% from December)

Bounce Rate: 8.2% ( -90.2% from the start, – 91% from December)

Sessions: 8,229 ( + 192% from the start, +143% from December)

Users: 3,965 ( +106% from the start, +33.9% from December)

Bloglovin: 1,664 ( +23.6% from the start, +6.2% from December)

Email Subscribers: 104 (started at 0, +22% from December)

Social Media

Facebook: 781 ( +29.9% from the start, +1.4% from December)

Twitter: 2,144 ( +38.7% from the start, +7.3% from December)

Instagram: 1,029 ( +156.6% from the start, +29% from December)

Google+: 164 ( +95.2% from the start, +6.5% from December)

Pinterest: 2,011 ( +119.7% from the start, +5.7% from December)

Tumblr: 3,482 ( +0.8% from December)

Top Posts

1. 40 Blog Post Ideas
2. Take Better Notes on Your Readings
3. Relationships and Chronic Pain
4. 40 Blog Post Ideas for Lifestyle Bloggers
5. Blog Post Ideas for 2016
6. How I Promote My Blog Posts
7. Chronic Pain and Loving Someone with It
8. Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
9. 10 Ways To Get More Blog Traffic in 2016
10. How To Cheer Up a Friend Who’s Feeling Down

Traffic Analysis

What I Did

• How I promote my blog posts
• Changed settings on reduce bounce rate plugin – I had the wrong settings (more below)
• All new posts have links that open in new tabs to reduce bounce rate
• connected Instagram to blog Facebook page
• Featured on HCBN page and in the January newsletter
• Sponsoring Becca Dorr (in-post ad)
• Changed general settings/name of the blog including the term “Boston lifestyle blog”
• Tagline now says: Boston lifestyle blog with Information on Writing and Living with Arthritis
• Giveaway through Becca Dorr
• My giveaway

What Worked

• Changing the settings on the reduce bounce rate plugin – When I switched to WordPress, I added the Google Analytics by Yoast plugin to connect the blog to my Google Analytics account. In December, I added the Reduce Bounce Rate plugin like Alicia suggested. It turns out that if you have universal tracking is enabled in your analytics plugin, you have to select a different part of the tracking code than if you don’t. Stephanie pointed this out to me on Twitter at the beginning of January, and after changing this, things changed for the better. How did this help? Now, the reduce bounce rate plugin takes into consideration if people scroll down and spend a large amount of time on the blog. If someone clicks onto this blog and quickly leaves, that counts towards bounce rate. But if they are scrolling and reading, that doesn’t count. This is great because pretty much all of my posts are longer ones.
• Connected Instagram to Facebook page – This has created more interaction on my Facebook page, which makes more people see it and what’s on it.
• Sponsoring Becca – Not only did this mean that everyone who read her posts saw my ad, but it also included several organic Tweet promotions to her nearly 2500 followers.

I Haven’t Seen Results From

• Changing the name and tagline of the blog – This is the kind of change that will hopefully change things dramatically over time. The big change is the inclusion of Boston lifestyle blog in it, so that if anyone searches for that, I should hopefully pop up.

Previous Goals

• 5,000 monthly page views – SUCCESS! Hit it out of the park!
• 2,000 Twitter followers – Again – success! This wasn’t very surprising, though, because I was really close in December.
• Decrease bounce rate – Well, I think that going from 85.58% bounce rate to 8.2% counts as a win.
• Maintain social media followers overall – Another success!

Plans & Goals for February

• 12,000 monthly page views
• 10,000 sessions
• 4,000 users
• Maintain other statistics (bounce rate, social media, etc.)

What has helped your blog traffic grow?