Browser SQM?

In my previous post about statistics, I have shown all kinds of numbers about the usage of the site. I am using Google Analytics to track usage data for the site (I have checked, and Microsoft doesn't have a similar feature, at least not yet).

To enable it, you get a unique site id from your Google Analytics account (everything is free), and then add a little bit of Java Script to all your pages, and ... Google Analytics starts gathering data from all the user sessions. For each user it tracks things like their location (up to the city level), browser, network speed, etc., length of the visit, how many pages and the exact order of pages visited, if it is a new user to the site or a returning user (using a cookie), if the user is coming from a referring site (and which site), or a search (and what were the search keywords), etc.

The amounts of data are huge, and Google Analytics offers lots of predefined reports to slice and dice the data in various ways.

Seriously, now

OK, so I had some fun with the Q1 FY09 financial results, but I am taking this seriously, and I need your help to succeed.

In the next posts I will start drilling down into the business and marketting side.

First Quarter Results

Bellevue, WA - October 7, 2008. 1 Family. Friendly. Food today announced first quarter revenue of $0.00 billion for the period ending September 30, 2008, a #DIV/0! increase over the same period of the prior year. Operating income for the quarter was $0.00 billion, and dilluted earnings per share were $0.00.

“We are pleased with the increasing pace of revenue growth throughout this fiscal year fueled by strong demand for our new offerings,” said the chief financial officer. “We are now accelerating our investments in the business to drive future growth, which is reflected in our financial guidance. We believe next fiscal year will deliver even stronger double-digit revenue growth than this year.”

Business Outlook
Management offers the following guidance for the quarter ending December 31, 2008:

• Revenue is expected to be in the range of $5 to $10.
• Operating income is expected to be in the range of $4 to $9.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this release that are "forward-looking statements" are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors such as:

• challenges to our core business model;
• intense competition in all our markets;
• our continued ability to protect the company’s intellectual property rights;
• claims that we have infringed the intellectual property rights of others;
• government litigation and regulation affecting how we design and market our products;
• our ability to attract and retain talented employees;
• delays in product development and related product release schedules;
• significant business investments that may not produce offsetting increases in revenue;
• adverse results in legal disputes;
• unanticipated tax liabilities;
• impairment of goodwill or amortizable intangible assets causing a charge to earnings;
• changes in accounting that may affect our reported earnings and operating income;
• exposure to increased economic and regulatory uncertainties from operating a global business;
• general economic and geo-political conditions;
• natural disaster, cyber-attack or other catastrophic event disrupting our business;
• acquisitions and joint ventures that adversely affect the business;
• limitations on the availability of insurance and resulting uninsured losses;
• sales channel disruption such as the bankruptcy of a major distributor;
• implementation of operating cost structures that align with revenue growth;
• and foreign currency, interest rate, fixed income, equity and commodity price risks.
  

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.

Vision and Target Audience

In order to make 1 Family. Friendly. Food. a success, one has to understand first its vision and target audience.

Nurit's primary goal is to show that it is not difficult to eat healthy homemade food. Here are the main types of posts in her blog:

• Dinner tonight posts give easy recipes and tips for preparing dinner at home (entrée and side dishes)
• A cake for the weekend is a collection of simple recipes for dessert. I love the smell of fresh cake when coming home from work on Friday evening!
• In the try something new posts, Nurit dares people to expand their culinary repertoire
• Cooking with kids tell stories on how our son is helping in the kitchen. Kids and food are some more thoughts around kids menus and teaching kids the basics of healthy eating. Those are some of my favorites.
• Other categories of posts include reviews of good cookbooks, making good use of leftovers, some time saving kitchen tools and more.

The primary target audience of her blog are busy people, mainly families with kids. They want to eat good, nutritious food, and educate their children for a healthy life, but are pressed for time. They are looking for simple, proved solutions.

The follow up question is who is the competition and what are the characteristics of this market. I have not explicitly looked into this yet, but I will start looking into this in one of the next posts.

In the next post I plan to give an overview of what we have done so far, and the current status of the traffic to the site.

Thoughts? Send me a message or comment.

The Beginning

I'm starting this blog to track the progress of the blog that my wife Nurit is writing (1 Family. Friendly. Food.) from its humble start till its success (I am wearing my "half full" shirt today, so not succeeding is not an option).

My definition of success is getting a lot of traffic and being able to monetize it. My bet right now is that getting a lot of traffic will be the difficult part, monetizing that traffic should be easier.

The theory is that in order to succeed, I need to define a goal (something like $1M in revenue in 1 year), but I am an incremental guy. So I'll start with measuring the current traffic and define the first goal derived from that, and keep increasing it. Stay tuned for details in one of the next posts.

Why would you read this blog?

• You want to see how my marketing / business efforts are going. That should be fun.
• You want to hear my observations on the technical side of things. Don't expect too much.
• You are bored.
• You want to be an active participant and forever be remembered as someone who helped make this experiment a success.
• You wonder if things are recursive, and if there is a relationship between this blog's success and Nurit's blog success.

In the next posts, I'll give a brief overview of Nurit's vision, some background of what we've done so far, where we are today, and start defining goals and strategies going forward.

Thoughts? Ideas? Send me a comment.