Clint is analyzing his weblog traffic … I'm his top sneezer
A. Clinton Ivy, the Instant Cognition blogger, is working his way through an analysis of his first 100 days of blogging, a trend perhaps started by Xavier Casanova in his 11 part (and counting) series on “Blogging Success: What Lessons Have You Learned” and recently joined by Avinash Kaushik in his “Thirty Days in Numbers” post.
Don’t you love it when analysts blog?
Anyway, Clint’s post today (part II in what will perhaps be a series like Casanova’s) has some interesting anecdotes. My personal favorite is this:
It boils down to this: “Eric T. Peterson is GREAT for business!” Since historical referral data has been available, Eric is responsible for 28.9% of all referrals.
Why thank you Clint!
The volume of traffic I push to my friend Clint is only surpassed by “directly referred traffic” at nearly 30%. Clint indicates that he needs to do a segmentation study on this data but hopes that 30% indicates “brand loyalty”. My suspicion, knowing what I know about why referring URL information gets dropped, thusly forcing sessions into the “directly referred URL” bucket, is that some of this is attributable to non-HTML RSS readers for which no referrer exists. You can see a small amount of traffic from Bloglines, My Yahoo and Google (his 1.5% which without knowing more one could assume is the Google Reader which should appear as “www.google.com/reader/view/” in a URL-level analysis) but it’s hard/impossible to know how much of Clint’s 30% is coming from RSS software, mobile phones, etc.
Clint’s comment about the steady quality of traffic I drive to his site:
My hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, there is a great commonality between Eric’s audience and those who find this blog useful so I get a relatively steady stream of referrals from his site.
Eric Butler commented to me once that he believed he was benefiting from the top-slot in my blogroll, and recently Matt Jacobs commented that I am driving a disproportionate volume of traffic to his blog. Maybe the steadiness Clint experiences is due to his placement in my blogroll?
Fortunately, I too am a navel gazer and so I measure everything on my site and in my RSS feeds. A quick analysis going back to January 1, 2006 shows that:
- From my Blogroll, I have sent Clint 205 clicks over 185 sessions from 168 unique visitors. More importantly (as in, “What has Clint done for me?”) these visitors have a 5.4 percent conversion rate back on my site, having bought a handful of books and submitted eight email addresses (some 0.7 percent of my total value since January 1, 2006)
- Eric Butler, on the other hand, holding the number one slot in the Blogroll (by virtue of his last name) has seen 616 clicks from 513 visitors over 562 sessions. Folks clicking to Eric from my site have a 7.7 percent conversion rate and have contributed 2.7 percent of the total value I am tracking (again, book sales and leads)
- From January 1, the top five Blogroll-traffic recipients were Eric, Xavier, Chris D’Allesandro, ROI Revolution and Bob Page (on a per-click basis) whose “clickers” converted at 7.5 percent and helped me sell roughly $1,000 worth of books. Thanks Guys!
- Since June 1st, more relevant since I have dropped some folks from my Blogroll, the list is Eric, Matt Jacobs, Avinash, ROI Revolution and Chris D’Allesandro whose “clickers” have converted at 5.5 percent and helped me sell just under $150 worth of books.
As I look at the distribution of Clint’s “clicks” they do appear to be quite steady, about 4 per day with peaks on May 10th and May 24th (no correlated increase in sitewide traffic on those days but I did update the web site on May 24th, moving Clint up in the list a bit so perhaps that was blog readers checking out the new site.)
Interestingly, all clickthrough referrals coming from the Blogspot.com domain since January 1, 2006 have only driven $140 in book sales and had an overall conversion rate of 9.0 percent. Still, I guess I shouldn’t complain … Avinash, bless his heart, has sent me 38 visitors who have consumed a great deal on my site (485 page views, fourth in a list of known blog referrers) but none of these folks have converted … I suppose that’s what I get for being critical 😉
Are you tracking your in-bound and out-bound traffic to this level of granularity? If so, what else are you tracking? If not, why not? Leave me your comments!
