Well I didn't make 100,000 visits as I hoped but I got close. As of yesterday's stats I had 98,517 visits from 71,701 visitors according to Google Analytics, plus today will be 300 or so. Other stats: busiest day (4 March) 403 visits from 348 people, quietest day (28 December) 101 visits from a mere 88 people.
The average visit is 4 pages in about 4 minutes. An ad gets clicked on 2% of the time it's shown, so roughly 8% or one visitor in 12 clicks on an ad, which indicates they're pretty well targeted. Just under half the people (46%) leave in under 10 seconds, but some of these might very well be people who immediately clicked on the site they were looking for. So I'm going to count some of them as satisfied customers (Google rather disparagingly calls this the 'Bounce Rate').
You can see Internet Explorer's market share slipping before your eyes: in the first three months of 2008 it was 55% IE, 33% Firefox, in the last three months it was 49% IE, 38% Firefox, while Safari and Opera had about 5% each, and Chrome, 2%. And I'm pleased to see the Macintosh market share increase over the same period, from 7.1% to 8.9%. Even a few iPhones in there, including mine.
Goals for 2009:
- 100,000 visitors
- 5 minutes and 5 pages per visit
- Less than 40% bounce rate
These are ambitious goals but I'll try to make them happen. I made a start this September when I redid the site design and colors. I hadn't changed anything since 2002 and it was showing - for the first time, I had fewer same-month visits, by 13%, than the previous year.
After making the changes, over the past month I have 6% more visitors than the same period last year.
Hopefully this indicates I'm on the right track.
