October 2008 Results

October was by far the best month for 1. Family. Friendly. Food. so far, with the number of visits going up 483% month over month to 1825 visits. There were 1480 unique visitors (up 492% from 250 in September). In November, I expect the number of visits to go up 50% to about 2750 (see detailed analysis below).

Here is the week by week change in number of visits since July (click on the image for more details).



The income was still $0.00, with no clicks on ads. Currently there are no ads in the web site itself, only in searches.

Below you will find the distribution of visits by category, a quick overview of the status in each category, and the expected number of visits in November.

Search. This is traffic coming from search engines. The number of visits from search in October was 303, up 573% from 45 in September. See this post for more details about search engine traffic. In November, I expect a 60% increase in search engine traffic due to more posts (and therefore more hits), better rankings, and adding the blog to Live Search and Yahoo! Search.

Social sites. This is traffic coming as a result of publishing the posts in sites such as facebook, digg, reddit, etc. In October, there were 909 visits in this category, up from only 26 in September. This was by far the largest category in October, accounting for half the visits. 97% of all hits are from reddit.com, and I'll publish a separate post about this topic. In November I expect an increase of 75% in this category, due to a planned marketing push to several of these sites.

Other Family Friendly Food properties. This is traffic from other blogs that my wife writes (such as her new blog at Seattle P-I and Good Food Bad Food) and this blog. Traffic was up 907% to 141 visits in October. In November, I expect an increase of 50% primarily due to traffic from the Seattle P-I blog (which only came online a few days ago).

Other referring blogs. This is traffic originating from other blogs, usually food blogs. There were 93 visits in this category, up from 12 in September. Bloggers try to increase their traffic by posting comments in other blogs with a link back to their blog. Nurit is not very active in this, so I only expect a modest increase next month.

Direct traffic. This is users directly navigating to the site, probably by clicking a link in an email. There were 258 direct visits in October, up from 102 in September, but I don't expect any increase in November. I am planning to see if there are ways to improve the instrumentation for this category.

Web Mail. This is users clicking on a link in mail programs such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. There were 39 visits in October, and a similar number (35) in September. I don't expect any change in November.

Portals. This is a new category including things such as My Yahoo!, iGoogle and web news readers (such as Google Reader). It only had 15 visits in October (up from 2 in September), so it is too early to have a good plan for it. I will track it closely in November.

In terms of the quality of the visits, the number of pages per visit and average time in each visit went up slightly in October, after going down in September.

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.