I used August to bring in more writers to the site. We already had Rob and Erin pitching in, but I knew we needed more. From the list of 20 or so people who registered interest, I found Berke and Myles who were the only ones to both send in a good bit of writing and also agree to the terms of joining the team (my “don’t be a dick” policy wasn’t agreeable to some apparently!). Their first reviews came in September. Regardless, I bounced back from my mental health issues and with the help of Rob and Erin, this was a very successful month for the site!

Overview

Pageviews – 627 (⬆ 33.69%)
Users – 306 (⬆ 6.62%)
Sessions – 402 (⬆ 18.24%)
Pages/Session – 1.56 (⬆ 13.07%)
Goal 1 – Viewed >1 page – 89 (⬆ 39.06%)
Goal 2 – On-site >2 mins – 37 (⬆ 48%)
Goal conversion rate – 31.34% (⬆ 19.74%)

The number of page views is the primary stat I use to determine site growth, with other stats giving more information on the form that growth has taken. at 627, this is the highest the site has ever had! Beating June by… 1 view.

There were also 126 total goal completions, again the highest we’ve ever had, beating June’s 109. Incidentally, the bounce rate looks the best it ever has, sitting in the high 70% instead of the high 80%/mid 90% that I’ve seen previously.

Actually, everything is up compared to June, meaning August was the site’s best month so far, both in terms of raw views and also in terms of engagement with the site.

Audience

New Visitor – 84.3% (⬆ 8.81%)
Returning Visitor – 15.7% (⬆ 1.92%)

Sources

Social – 64.95% (⬇ 3.35%)
Direct – 18.33% (⬆ 3.64%)
Organic – 9.65% (⬆ 25%)
Referral – 7.07% (⬆ 340%)

Referral traffic is nice. That’s usually when someone links to your site on their own, but can also be from emails or whatever. In August, Someone included our review in their linktree showing all of their reviews, and this gave the site’s referral numbers a nice spike.

Organic is search engine traffic, so it’s really cool to see this going up as well. It means people are finding us through search engines, and the reason this is a positive and not just a given is that this is still a relatively new site with low domain authority, a score Google uses to determine how relevant your page might be to a user’s search query.

Social traffic

Facebook – 57.43% (⬆ 1.75%) (of all social traffic)
Twitter – 40.59% (⬇ 6.82%)
Reddit – 1.49% (⬆ 50%)
Other – 0.5% (⬇ 80%)

The main reason Facebook content did better than Twitter content is that the Aenigmatum and Necronautical reviews were picked up by the bands who then shared them. Apparently, they both have decent Facebook followings!