Have you ever wondered how much to write for consumers (localism) and for professionals (active rain)? I've read the benefits of localizing content. I've heard the rumblings because consumers rarely leave comments. There is value in writing both, but I learned something new today. I learned more about links that people click on in my blogs. I like cold hard facts. So here ya go....
I checked out my web site referring sites traffic reports. I did a search by keywords, first for 'activerain', then for 'localism'. I wanted to first see traffic sent from both places and then do a comparison.
Comparing Referral Traffic - Active Rain vs. Localism
| ActiveRain.com | Localism.com |
Pages per visit | 12.78 | 25.48 |
Time on site | 05:57 (min:sec) | 11:39 (min:sec) |
New Visits | 33.95% | 61.30% |
Bounce Rate | 30.06% | 20.87% |
What did I learn? People finding my web site because they read my blogs on localism -- are ultimately finding my site more interesting, than people visiting my site from Active Rain. This makes sense to me because my web site has more tools for consumers. Still pretty cool though - that even industry folks (traffic from active rain) are spending time on the site as well.
If your service/public web site is tailored towards services for realtors I would expect you would find these numbers flip-flopped - check it out - comment here.
Comparing Referral Traffic (by +/- %) to Main Site Averages
| Pages per visit | Time on site | new visits | bounce rate |
activerain.com | -46.52% | -48.26%) | 47.28% | 114.29% |
localism.com | 6.62% | 1.39% | 80.58% | 48.75% |
What did I learn? I found this even more interesting. This tells me that people who find my site through my localism posts are actually spending more time and veiwing more pages on my site than my average site visitor. They are also sending me a lot of new visitors - versus traffic I get in other places.
Links from my activerain posts are sending me 3X the traffic that my localism posts send. Makes sense because intuitively I think activerain has more traffic than localism. However Localism is sending higher quality - more relevant traffic.
If you are not familiar with web site stats - Here's a quick reference.
I use google analytics for certain types of web site traffic reports. (If you are not familiar with google analytics it's free to use up to a certain threshold of traffic. More than that and you have to use ad words)
- Referring Sites - Web sites that are sending you traffic.
- Pages/Visit - The average number of pages viewed during a visit to your site.
- Average Time on Site - The average duration of a visit to your site.
- New Visits - The percentage of visits by people who had never visited your site before.
- Bounce Rate - The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).
Food for Thought...
- Why should you write localism posts? I think this is pretty excellent evidence. Write on.....
- What do your stats show about the traffic you are sending to your sites by posting your blogs on active rain and localism?
- It would be interesting to see some recent traffic report updates from Active Rain staff as well - in regards to the growth of localism.
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