Statistics

In this post I'll cover some of the statistics we've seen so far.

Nurit started her blog 1 Family. Friendly. Food on July 15, 2008. She posted 20 posts in July, 11 in August and 17 in September. In the past 2 months it has been about 5 posts per week.

Visitors
Below is a graph showing the number of visitors over time (click to enlarge).



As you can see, excluding a peak on July 31st that I cannot explain, September looks much better than July and August, which is good. The total number of visits from unique visitors more than doubled from August (102) to September (250).

Traffic Sources
In August, 86% of the usage came from direct traffic (i.e. users going directly to the blog, usually when getting an email pointing to it), 4% from referring sites, and 10% from search engines.
In September, 46% of the usage came from direct traffic, 40% came from referring sites, and 15% from search engines.

	Direct traffic	Referring sites	Search engines
August	86%	4%	10%
September	46%	40%	15%

This is a positive development. Direct traffic is basically my wife emailing to everyone she knows asking them to look at the blog, and similar activities (such as giving a talk about the subject in our son's daycare). While these are good to get initial traffic going, they do not scale to more than a handful of visitors. Increasing the traffic from referring sites and search engines is much more sustainable. The peak on September 23rd (28 unique visitors) is because of a comment that Nurit posted on a high traffic blog, which resulted in traffic back to 1 Family. Friendly. Food. The higher peak on September 25th (82 unique visitors) is being referred from the navigation bar at the top of the blogger.com site (that one is still a bit of a mystery, but the only relevant button there is the "Next blog" one. It seems to pick a random blog, so why where there so many hits that day? The only explanation I have is that the day before Nurit added a "Powered by Blogger" gadget to her blog, and maybe that's how she got compensated...)

There are huge amounts of usage data available. In the next post, I'll talk a little about the technology used to gather data and what is available to mine.