Analyzing Traffic

I have several blogs. One wildly unpopular education blog, one about Christian Family life and sustainability, this technology blog, and a brand new one which is attached to a contest database. I was looking at the stats for my sites and based on those stats considered making some changes. Before those changes were made, I wanted to check further into the stats. Tired Garden and Shabam Development are the only ones with decent traffic, so we will just look at them. Contest Farm is brand new and Shabam School I don't write on much.

Shabam Development has had 23,176 page views in the last year. My sustainability blog, 32,326. At first glance that might seem like I should spend a little more time on Tired Garden, but work on both. But let's consider something I forgot to mention. While Tired Garden is over a year old, Shabam Development is only 6 months old. Now that would seem to make things different. Especially if you just look at the last month. In the last month, Shabam has had 10,751 page views and Tired Garden 2208. Ok, that settles it, I'm ditching Tired Garden and working solely in Shabam!

Wait, not yet! Shabam had 23,176 page views in 6 months and 10,751 of those in the last month? Half of the reads were in the last month? Is there a spike? Yes. I have one wildly popular rant that has received 15,047 reads in total, 9,649 of those in the last month. It is a popular article and garners me a lot of traffic, mostly from Stumble Upon (16 reviews and 35 thumbs up). If I cut out this one article my traffic on this site plummets to 5398 page views in the last month. Still better than Tired Garden.

Considering that I have worked hard to build the traffic for Tired Garden and have let Shabam Development sit, even not writing on it for 2 months, I think that this tells me somthing. With little to no work on Shabam and lot of work on Tired Garden, even ignoring the one anomaly, Shabam got 3190 more page views last month than Tired Garden.

Now this tells me that writing more on Shabam is a good thing. In another article I will be analyzing the type of articles that are getting the best views for me and I will be altering my writing based on this. I will also look at other important factors, such as which articles get comments and which have outside links.