Last month traffic to Technically Easy continued to remain steady, which can be a good and bad thing. The good is that traffic didn’t decrease, especially with Google making changes to the search algorithm. The bad is that steady traffic means there was no, or very little, growth. I would still like to see a minor increase in traffic, but I realize that last month there wouldn’t be much in terms of increase.
Continued Steady Growth or Plateau?
It was just over a year ago that I experienced a plateau in traffic, which is always frustrating to have to go through. I have read many posts about other bloggers and webmasters that have gone through similar experiences, and each one seems to have their own take on solving the problem.
Last year I started to post more frequently and became more active online with social media and blog commenting. By performing both tasks I managed to have tremendous grown throughout the last half of last year. This year, traffic to my blog decreased at the beginning, but has leveled off the past few months.
For this month, the steady traffic has continue as shown by the graph below, with a comparison to May of last year.
Click to enlarge
While the graph line tends to seem to go high and low, in reality the line isn’t so exaggerated because the scale of the graph lends itself to such drastic peaks and valleys in the graph. Overall, there was an increase in traffic compared to last year, albeit, a much smaller increase than I have seen in past months.
| Metric | May 2011 | May 2012 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 76,105 | 87,536 | 15.02% |
| Pageviews | 106,530 | 117,114 | 9.94% |
I also need to keep in mind that May of last year was when I started to see good traffic, so I am pleased that I have increased both visitors and pageviews since last year.
Traffic Sources
As for traffic sources, there was a new addition to the list – Campaigns. I’m not sure where this traffic source came from as I haven’t run any type of campaign this month. When I drilled down into the information on the campaign it eventually indicated the campaign as “Lifehacker Newsletter / email”. I am familiar with Lifehacker, but not with the campaign. Whatever that campaign is, it provided 18 visitors to Technically Easy.
Click to enlarge
With regards to the other traffic sources, search engines continue to dominate, but with less of a percentage of total traffic. Just under 90% (87.69%) of traffic came from search engines, which is at the lowest level since before I began reporting my traffic numbers. Both referral and direct traffic numbers, however, are still well behind search engine traffic.
As for the traffic plateau, I haven’t really be active online as often over the past two months, which is what I needed to do to increase my traffic a year ago. I did publish more often, but publishing and participating go hand-in-hand, so starting this month I will look at increasing my online participation and see what happens.