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The Business Blog at Intuitive.com
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Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and
is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business
issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related
startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed.
Dave maintains three weblogs, The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, focused on business and
industry analysis,
the eponymous
Ask Dave Taylor
devoted to tech and business Q&A and The
Attachment Parenting Blog,
discussing topics of interest to parents.
Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and
frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.
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2007 traffic statistics for AskDaveTaylor, my Q&A weblog
If you're reading this, you already know that I also run the busy Ask Dave Taylor site, focused on tech support and related Q&A topics. What you don't know are the traffic statistics of the site. I read Google blogger Matt Cutts' stats and was inspired to post my own. It's quite interesting:
First off, note that I only turned on Google Analytics in April of '07, so the numbers you see are for three quarters of the year, not all four quarters. Extrapolate and you'll come up with 11.6 million visitors and 17.71 million page views for the year. Yow, that's a lot of traffic!
Dig a bit deeper and you'll notice a peculiar characteristic of a Q&A site: there's a relatively low percentage of people who come back. Why? Because most people don't start out on Ask Dave Taylor, but rather on Google or another search engine. You can see what I mean by searching on Google for iphone help, for example. I'm #1, so I get lots of that traffic.
Nonetheless, while ADT is arguably one of the most trafficked blogs on the Web with over one million visitors/month sustained throughout 2007, 87% or more of that traffic are first time visitors. Very interesting, I'd say! Before you say "ah, that means that your search engine placement is a critical factor in the success of the site" do the other half of the math and you'll find that 13% of 13.3 million visits is 1.7 million return visitors, month by month, so even if we were to lop off all of the new traffic, that's still quite a healthy figure for a weblog.
Don't forget too that this doesn't take into account RSS subscribers who might not actually visit the site itself nor traffic that is subverted by sites scraping (uh, sorry, "aggregating") my content on their own pages. Not germane to this discussion other than that it could account for another reason why there appear to be a relatively low percentage of subscribers.
If you're running Google Analytics, go back and review 2007, then post what I think is the most interesting number: % new visits. Also add a sentence or two to characterize your blog and let's see if we can draw some more general characterizations of typical traffic on different types of weblogs.
Hi Dave,
Not as much traffic as you but I had visitors from 140 countries, which is kinda cool. I turned Google Analytics on in June 2007 so that's for half the year.
Posted by: Debbie Weil on January 10, 2008 5:45 PM82% new here, but that may be somewhat wrong. Around Thanksgiving, my hosting provider had Google remove ALL my entries with their domain name "hostit1.connectria.com". To be fair, a misconfiguration caused that to be the URL instead of the twduff.com domain I generally used. But their marketing person found I was outdrawing them on searches for their company name. Instead of working with me to resolve the issue, she unilaterally "killed my existence" in the virtual world with no warning.
Needless to say, my configuration issues are now resolved, I'm using a different host, and I'm trying to build up traffic again under the duffbert.com domain.
Never a dull moment. :)
Posted by: Thomas "Duffbert" Duff on January 10, 2008 8:59 PM~48% new on a personal blog about everything, really.
Posted by: gorgeoux on January 11, 2008 6:21 AM6000 visits and about 90% new, a business website though, not a blog. I also paid for more than half of my visitors, so the numbers could probably go up with more advertising dollars. 40% from Amazon's ClickRiver ads (which I've had great success with), and 20% from Google Adwords ads (too many competitors there for keywords).
Posted by: Sara G on January 11, 2008 12:29 PM
Impressive numbers! I am often surprised how often your site pops up #1 when I am searching for simple questions that everyone asks.
Actually I've only been using Google Analytics since about October 2007 and find it somewhat perplexing. For example, though it may be an issue with how I have things configured, I have a difficult time comparing data month to month, something I find incredibly valuable when trying to build traffic. I find the e-mailed monthly traffic reports confusing and sometimes contradictory. I'm trusting, however, that I'm just having a long learning curve so I'm hanging on until things get better.
Posted by: Shawn A. Hessinger on January 11, 2008 6:18 PM
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The Business Blog
