Last month was a good and bad month for traffic. The good was that traffic has returned to where it was at the end of last year, which was great to see, especially with the algorithm changes by Google this year. The bad news was that there was an issue with my blog in the middle of the month, which had an impact on the traffic for two days, but the overall impact to traffic was negligible.
Traffic Stats
I was happy to see the number of visitors that visited Technically Easy last month almost matched the highest levels of last year – before the traffic numbers decreased. I continued to publish posts on my blog, and didn’t worry too much about link building and it seems Google liked that. I’m trying a new approach of staying under the radar and hopefully my blog will continue to see an increase in traffic after each algorithm change.
The graph below shows the traffic stats for the month of August.
As you can see there is a nice drop in the middle of August, which was a result of my blog being down for about 24 hours. While I was away on vacation, my blog used quite a bit of CPU, so my host disabled my account until I could resolve the issue.
The problem was that I was on vacation, so I really didn’t check in on my blog as often as I had been doing while not on vacation. When I did check in, I was surprised to see my blog down. I managed to use my host’s live chat to figure out the issue, and then replied to my host stating that I had taken care of the problem. Within 30 minutes my blog was up and running.
The good news was that traffic levels weren’t affected by the outage for the remainder of the month.
In terms of actual numbers, the table below shows a comparison between August 2012 and August 2011.
| Metric | August 2011 | August 2012 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 89,957 | 108,841 | 20.99% |
| Pageviews | 122,022 | 141,519 | 15.98% |
Last month also saw a nice increase in both visitors and pageviews compared to the same time the previous year. This was the largest increase that I have seen this year compared to the same month the previous year, which is really encouraging for me. While it may be difficult to reach 200,000 visitors by the end of year, at least I can hop to come very close to that target and possible reach it early next year.
Traffic Sources
In terms of traffic sources, not a whole lot has changed in this area, with search engines still providing the majority of traffic to Technically Easy. While it isn’t over 90% as I have seen in the past, it is still high at over 88%.
The graph below shows the traffic sources breakdown for the month of August.
The number of visitors from search engines almost reached 100,000 for the month, with both direct and referral traffic well behind at 7,384 and 5,190, respectively. While it is still nice to see search engines providing so much traffic, I would still rather have a more balanced source of traffic to Technically Easy.
Overall, I am pleased with the traffic numbers for last month. It is reassuring to see the numbers almost match the end of last year, even with the downtime in the middle of the month. I am hoping the number of visitors continue to increase this month, and with no downtime, even exceed the numbers from August.