Last month saw a fairly significant drop in my traffic throughout the month. While December ended on a high note, January sort of flattened out and eventually saw a downward trending curve throughout the month. In the past, however; January has always seen a decrease in both earnings and visitors as the holiday season has finished. I’m hoping that my traffic fortunes reverse over the next couple of months.
A Drop in Traffic
January didn’t start out too bad, but as the month continued, the traffic levels slowly dropped. It can be frustrating to see traffic levels decrease, especially since I had good traffic months leading up to December. There will always be ups and downs while managing a blog or website online, so I’ll just take this as one of the downs and move on.
(Click to enlarge)
The graph above doesn’t look too good, especially comparing the traffic at the beginning of the month to the end of the month. I’m hoping that I can reverse the trend going forward, but it will require some more work and more publishing. Year over year, the traffic was still up as can be seen in the following table.
| Metric | January 2011 | January 2012 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 63,892 | 103,814 | 62.48% |
| Pageviews | 91,368 | 135,611 | 48.42% |
Unfortunately, I am just above 100,000 visitors for the month, and my target of 200,000 for the year end is looking like an unachievable goal. Still, I wil keep that target and will have to work a bit harder now to achieve that goal, but first I will need to reverse the downward traffic trend.
Traffic Sources
The largest drop, which can also account for most of my traffic drop last month, is with the search engines. I lost roughly 12,000 search engines visitors last month compared to the previous month, which accounts for almost the total drop in visitors for the month.
My traffic sources are shown below.
(Click to enlarge)
While the number of search engines visitors dropped, it still remained my largest traffic source, albeit, a bit smaller in terms of percent. When looking into a more detailed view of where the largest drops occurred, I notice that many of the pages were probably visited during the holiday season by people looking for information.
I’m hoping that the drop in traffic is only temporary, or that some of my newer posts will start ranking for some keywords to make up the difference. Time will only tell in that regard.
While my blog experienced a large drop in traffic last month, I am still optimistic that this trend will reverse over the next few months. When comparing my traffic from January 2011, I also noticed a drop during the month from December 2010. I won’t be taking any drastic steps to try and improve my traffic other than continue to publish content. I’ll have to continue to watch my traffic levels and evaluate the numbers going forward.