September 2021 – Open Stats

This was the first month the site functioned with a full staff of writers and this resulted in it being the best month in the history of the site. Really happy with how things went in September. Almost every stat is up on August which was a great month itself. The main reason I’m happy with September however is that my articles were not in the top three of traffic generators for the site. It was all new writers who took that! Thanks folks 🙂

Overview

Pageviews – 893 (⬆ 42.42%)
Users – 462 (⬆ 39.22%)
Sessions – 580 (⬆ 44.28%)
Pages/Session – 1.54 (⬇ 1.29%)
Goal 1 – On-site >2 mins – 41 (⬆ 10.81%)
Goal 2 – Viewed >1 page – 129 (⬆ 44.94%)
Goal conversion rate – 29.31% (⬇ 6.49%)

One of the new reviewers brought in a tonne of traffic with a review but this had an oversized effect on our interaction stats. This is why the goal conversion rate is down compared to the previous month but each goal individually is up. I think this is also why the pages per session are down, but the bounce rate still looks good so… 🤷‍♂️

Audience

New Visitor – 84.2% (⬆ 39.22%)
Returning Visitor – 15.8% (⬆ 39.62%)

Sources

Social – 75.46% (⬆ 62.87%)
Direct – 16.51% (⬆ 26.32%)
Organic – 7.34% (⬆ 6.67%)
Referral – 0.69% (⬇ 86.36%)

One of the things I am working on is making the site’s success and growth less reliant on my input. This obviously means spreading out the review work over more people but it also means traffic diversity. I know that the majority of the social traffic comes from my output on Twitter and Facebook. While reviewers will also contribute to that from their own social media accounts, I think I would be happier with ~60% of traffic being from social. 25% direct and 15% organic sound like good targets.

Referral traffic is going to be harder and increasing this is probably a longer-term target since this will primarily come from the bands and labels on their own platforms (ie not from their social media channels) and that’s harder to come by, given everyone primarily uses social media as their promotional channels. If this hovers around 1%-2%, I’ll be fine with that.

Social traffic

Facebook – 63.25% (⬆ 81.03 %) (of all social traffic)
Twitter – 34.34% (⬆39.02%)
Reddit – 0.3% (⬇ 66.67%)
Other – 2.11% (⬆ 322%)

Can you guess which channel brought in the traffic that spiked the goals and killed the goal conversion?