Eazy Cheezy’s 2008 Traffic and Visitor Analysis

It’s Christmas Eve and for some reason I have statistics on my mind. I love statistics, whether it be in sports, politics, etc. Using Google Analytics, I’ve been analyzing this years traffic the last couple of hours to get a better understanding of where my visitors are coming from, how many are returning and traffic from social networking sites, search engines, etc.

I’ve recently posted my Top 10 Most popular Posts in 2008, but wanted to continue by displaying traffic results by utilizing graphical charts. I’ve been using NCES free Graph Creator.

Visitors
Visitors are very important to me. This first chart analyzes the top 10 Countries I’ve received the most traffic from. In all, I’ve had 232, 300 visitors from 178 different countries and territories. This is why I found it very important to install a Language Translator widget on my sidebar to ensure the usability.
Getting those to visit is only half the battle. How many of those visitors return and how many become loyal readers? I’d love to increase the number of returning visitors, but the best I can do is to try to continue to provide rich content. The most amazing stat to me is that I’ve had 150 visitors come back 51-100 times and 13 visitors who have returned 101-200 times. That’s amazing to me.Traffic
Visitors are extremely important, but it’s important to see how they are finding Eazy Cheezy. This first chart displays the 3 different categories visitors used to get to the site. As you can see, I’m doing quite well with the referring sites (i.e. social networking, other sites, etc.), but I’d love to improve my direct traffic (those going directly to my site, rather than clicking a link). I really need to improve the search engine traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be a priority within the next month or so to hopefully improve the search engine visitors.

Now that I’ve taken a look at the overall traffic, it’s time to dig into the top 10 specific traffic sources. As you can see, Stumbled Upon has given me almost 75% of my overall traffic. The direct traffic has also been great. I was pleasantly surprised to see some great traffic from a Turkish site, Bildirgec (987 hits) and ThePostmansCorner (452 hits).

This next chart displays the traffic received from the various search engines. Google has done quite well for me, but I’m quite disapointed with the other search engine results, primarily Yahoo and MSN.
The last thing I wanted to take an in depth look at was my Top 10 Social Networking sites that are giving me traffic. Stumbled Upon completely blew away Digg as you may have read in my Stumbled Upon vs. Digg Traffic Experiment. Surprises in the list included some sites I’d never registered for, such as Squidoo, Friendfeed, Live Journal and Plunk. I was also very surprised to see Facebook giving me 411 hits. My disapointment from the list was Twitter, which gave me just 53 hits.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this post as much as I have. It will prove to be a great tool for me as I move forward with the site in 2009. A goal of mine in 2009 is to better balance out the referral traffic with the search engine and direct traffic. This could take significant work, but I’ll continue to make improvements. Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.