RnR: Blog Traffic Data and Analysis

by Sean J. Vaughan

Here are some traffic statistics to give you an idea of how we're growing. We're using Google Analytics to collect and display this information.

Visitors per day

This graph shows the number of vistors per day we've gotten since the beginning of this year. We have had a small but steady growth curve to where we are now averaging about 50 visitors per day.

The spikes are largely caused by articles being popular in the social bookmarking sites or coincide with blog carnivals linking to our articles. The largest spike we've experienced was 140 visitors and occured in the Fall when Bob Seitz's Global Warming article was reviewed and linked to by (an evidently popular) stumbleupon.com user [this is not pictured in this graph].

Pageviews per visit

Our pageviews per visit are holding pretty steady at about 1.5. This means that, on average, one out of every 2 visitors checks out 2 articles before leaving the site.

Top Referrals

As you can see here, the vast majority of our visitors come from google searches. Next most are viewers coming directly. We've only shared the "ReasonAndRhyme.com" url to friends and acquaintences so those visitors basically count as "word-of-mouth". The "gabbly.com" referrer is the from the "Chat" feature which basically only I use (I think!) so that's probably only me. "Reddit.com", "stumbleupon.com", "del.icio.us", and "digg.com" are social news and social bookmarking sites (more about these in a later article). They refer many readers but only reddit shows up in our top 10 this year. "drsanity.blogspot.com" is a host of a very popular humor blog carnival where Richard May's "NASA Plans To Construct Earth Base" article was included. The rest of the top 10 referral sources are basically search related. I'll talk more about how we work to increase our position in search results in a later article.

Most Viewed Articles of 2007

Article	Unique Views	Pageviews	Avg Time	% Exit
The Sonnet	250	293	00:04:48	83.62%
Epic Poetry	128	158	00:03:52	77.85%
Valentine's Day Card	88	116	00:02:31	66.38%
NASA Plans to Construct Earth Base	96	104	00:01:00	89.42%
label: poetry	78	96	00:01:18	70.83%
The Statistics of Stereotyping	72	82	00:07:39	84.15%
label: Maria Claudia Faverio	64	82	00:01:45	50.00%
Must We Grow Old?	71	80	00:01:22	85.00%
label: Richard May	56	75	00:03:06	52.00%
Atheism Defined	61	73	00:04:06	69.86%
Mnemonics and Blindfold Chess	54	72	00:04:46	68.06%
Number Series Puzzle	42	66	00:02:30	51.52%
Winter Poem	54	60	00:01:10	85.00%
label: Brian Schwartz	39	54	00:01:57	51.85%
label: Dan Barker	35	51	00:02:41	45.10%

I've dropped the direct homepage hits from this list but there were 584 uniq views and 799 pageviews directly to the homepage. In a later article I'll describe what seem to be the primary causes for articles to get views. For now, I'll list briefly how I think the top 15 became the top 15:

1. The Sonnet
2. Epic Poetry: These are very complete and authoritative articles on the title subjects. People find it in google searches and read it once they click on the article. Epic Poetry was included in "Ringing of the Bards", a poetry blogging carnival.
3. Valentine's Day Card: The simple article title along with our blog title "Reason and Rhyme" caused google to put this article on the front page of searches for terms like "Valentine's Day rhyme".
4. NASA Plans to Construct Earth Base: This article was included in the very popular drsanity.blogspot.com humor blog carnival.
5. label: poetry: It seems that our blog title, "Reason and Rhyme", combined with the number of high quality poems and poetry related articles we post cause google to put us fairly high in poetry and rhyming related searches. Especially this label page which contains all of our poetry related articles.
6. The Statistics of Stereotyping: This article is a very simple and strong discussion of the topic which followed onto Albert Frank's article on the related statistics. It was submitted to digg and reddit. And, because of its simple and appropriate title, it shows up near the top of a search for "the statistics of stereotyping" which is a hot topic this decade.
7. label: Maria Claudia Faverio: Maria's articles on different forms of poetry are popular. This causes her label page which contains all of those articles and her poetry also to be popular.
8. Must We Grow Old?: This article has been included in several health related blog carnivals and has been submitted to digg and reddit.
9. label: Richard May: Richard has written a lot of articles and, again, his NASA humor piece was included in the humor blog carnival.
10. Atheism Defined: This piece shared by Dan Barker was included in the popular Carnival of The Godless and has been linked from several atheism related blogs.
11. Mnemonics and Blindfold Chess: This topic is commonly searched for and this is a very strong article about it.
12. Number Series Puzzle: Commonly searched for.
13. Winter Poem: This was included in the "Ringing of The Bards" poetry blogging carnival and is searched for regularly. Again, having "rhyme" in our blog title seems to help our poetry articles show up higher in search results.
14. label: Brian Schwartz: Brian has written many articles and they are searched for and found. His Winter Poem above, Club Kids, and Crawpappy's bar articles are commonly read. Also, recently, people have been google searching on a teenager named Brian Schwartz who was killed in an avalanche in Utah :( .
15. label: Dan Barker: Several of Dan's articles have been shared in The Carnival of The Godless and Dan has high visibility as co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.