The previous month showed that traffic numbers had decreased when the holiday season was over. The traffic numbers continue in a downward trend throughout January, which put my target of 200,000 visitors per month by the end of the year in jeopardy.
Last month the numbers were much lower than the end of 2011, but the traffic numbers leveled off for most of the month, and then began to move upwards towards the end of the month. While there were fewer days in February, the numbers were still fairly low, but were higher than last year.
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.
Traffic Stats – January 2012 (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.
Traffic Sources – January 2012 (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.
After achieving my goal two months ago and then setting my new target last month of 200,000 visitors per month, December saw a minor setback in terms of traffic. While it may not have been the best ending to a good traffic year, I can’t say I am disappointed by what was accomplished over the past year.
It is difficult to constantly raise traffic numbers each month, so I’m not too surprised with lower numbers in December. I feel the numbers were still fairly good, but I also know there is still a lot of work ahead of me to reach my target of 200,000 by the end of 2012.
I achieved my goal of 100,000 visitors last month, and have set a new target of 200,000. I feel that I can achieve this goal by the end of next year, but it will require some good increases in traffic each month.
In order to reach the new monthly visitor target, Technically Easy will need to continue to increase traffic each month. November was the first month in the goal to reach the 200,000 monthly visitor mark.
A few months ago I wrote a post where I talked about how you measure your blog’s success. In that post I mentioned how it is important to set goals for you blog, and then try to achieve those goals. For me, when I achieve a blogging goal I deem my blog to be successful. With each goal I achieve, I enjoy new success with my blog.
Last month I achieve a goal that I had set early in the year. Throughout the year I worked to achieve my goal and it was very gratifying to finally realize the success of achieve that goal. In October, Technically Easy received 100,000 visitors.
Last month my blog had experienced a few issues, which in the end affected the amount of traffic to my blog. The issues involved my blog experiencing downtime throughout the month. For the most part the downtime was between a few minutes and less than an hour, there was a longer downtime that had an impact on my traffic levels.
Besides the downtime, which I will explain below, my traffic throughout September was pretty consistent, but I am always striving to consistently increase my traffic each month.
Much like July, the traffic stats for August were pretty steady throughout the month. There were a few dips that were followed by increases, but overall the traffic level remained consistent.
The one thing, however, that I have noticed is that my traffic seemed to have a minor slowdown compared to both July and August 2010. While there is still a nice increase year-over-year, the overall increase was lower than the previous three month increases. Below is my traffic analysis for August 2011.
