I don’t spend as much time on Google Analytics as I ought, but when I start analyzing the data behind your clicks on this blog, I am sometimes astonished what I find. For instance, would it surprise you to learn an article I wrote on Facebook censorship of Twitter caused the largest number of blog visitors in the past year?
Analyzing the past 365 days on AriWriter
Do you see the highest concentration of peaks centered around New Years Eve 2009 and April 2009?
The first cluster involves a Facebook scam when I scooped the competition and virally became the de facto source of accurate updates. I later wrote how one blog post quintupled inbound visitors seeking information.
The second cluster of concentrated visitors was not for my April 13 interview with adult entertainer Stoya nor my April 25 explanation why I unfollowed everyone on Twitter–but an earlier March 13 blog post about Facebook censorship.
Aside from the blog post’s publication on March 13, other significant peaks in the above graph include March 16, April 13 (with 760, the same day Stoya came out), April 21, April 24, April 28 (with 2,395, the same day the Twitter train piece broke with 316 hits), and May 2 (with 1,066 visitors, or 72% of that day’s total).
Entrance paths to the blog post
Between March 13 and August 25, the censorship blog post witnessed 19,247 page views (including 17,278 unique views) and the average visitor spending 1 minute and 35 seconds reading it. I find these statistics more meaningful than the 89% bounce rate.
It’s also intriguing to learn that 97% found the content directly from external links; and oddly, the largest number of visitors arrived from stumbleupon.com–which testifies that sharing, not networking (such as retweeting links on Twitter), is more important for some types of content.
Here’s a graph of that single blog post over the months:
Frequent visitors to a blog post on Facebook censorship
There are several ways to take away this data, so I’ll ask you.
How can you extrapolate the results of my most popular blog post over the past year and repurpose it for your blog or business? Considering I’ve written many articles about Twitter, why does one on Facebook trump the rest–and what does this say to the content you write? Does search engine optimization play a part?
Related posts:
- Twitter Grading Over 30 Days
- How a Blog Post Could Go Viral
- My 20 Most Popular Blog Posts on Social Media
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
StumbleUpon is a fantastic resource, because your site can continue to have traffic driven to it long after the initial push (as opposed to Twitter).
New from Andrea Hill: Bot or Not? Twitblock identifies potential twitter spam accounts
Apparently. Are you a frequent stumbler? Do you digg and reddit and sphinn and mixx and furl, too?
I used to submit stuff to StumbleUpon a bit. I have a Digg account but rarely use it.
Don’t bother with reddit, mixx and furl, and while I rarely submit anything to Sphinn, I do use it to find new articles.
New from Andrea Hill: Bot or Not? Twitblock identifies potential twitter spam accounts