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.
Down But Not Out
Compared to November 2011, December 2011 didn’t start out as strong. The traffic numbers were down at the beginning of the month and for most of the month the number of visitors hovered just above 3,000 per day.
On Christmas day, however; I nice large traffic spike occurred and slowly decreased over the next few days. It was this traffic spike that produced traffic numbers that nearly matched November. The traffic spike was caused by increased activity from search engines, and can bee seen in the following chart.
(Click to enlarge)
The numbers for December, while down compared to November 2011, were still a healthy increase from the previous year. The table below compares December 2010 to December 2011.
| Metric | December 2010 | December 2011 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 66,695 | 114,469 | 71.63% |
| Pageviews | 95,133 | 148,398 | 55.99% |
The number of visitors increase by just over 70% while the number of pageviews was almost 56%. Unfortunately, this also means that visitors were viewing less pages per visit than the previous year but overall both numbers were still a healthy increase.
Traffic Sources
In terms of traffic sources, search engines continue to dominate and have actually increased as a percentage of my overall traffic at just over 91%. The number of visitors from search engines, however; have decreased by almost 2,000 for the month compared to November.
My referral traffic was down also, and only accounted for just over 3% of my visitors for the month. Direct traffic was a distant second with just over 5% of the visitors arriving directly to Technically Easy.
The chart below shows the traffic sources breakdown for December 2011.
(Click to enlarge)
December was a busy month so I wasn’t active online as much as I have been the previous months, which could explain the referral traffic. Now that the holidays have come and gone, I’ll look at ramping up my online activity in January.
While the traffic numbers for December were down I am not going into panic mode. I’ll take additional steps to increase my traffic throughout 2012 and try and reach my goal. I’ll have to be more active online to increase my referral traffic and look at other means of driving traffic to my blog. While the end of 2011 proved a little disappointing, I am pleased with how the traffic numbers grew throughout the year and am looking forward to an even better year in 2012.