A Detailed Look At the Domain Shane Traffic Stats: Who Visits, How Long and How They Got Here

As I’ve stated many times before, I don’t mind sharing my site’s stats.  I learn a lot from them and I think others can as well.  While I love to analyze the data, I must admit I am pretty bad about doing much to change it.  Regardless, it’s still fun to take a look at the numbers, not the quantity of people, but more about visitors and their characteristics.  Use 25,000 uniques as your divider.

1.  Who drives domain industry traffic? For us, it’s the big three.   Google, and Domaining, and type in.  Look at the referrers

It showed a few things.  One, I royally suck at social media.  Two, I suck at driving traffic in general.  I was also surprised by how many more people were sent by Namebee than Domainsville.   I really thought Domainsville had made big inroads but with only 355 referrals, although much appreciated, there’s still some work to do.  I’ll save you some math and say that Domaining.com is 29% of my traffic.  It’s a very important part of what we do and don’t take it for granted.  I would love to see what percentage of out clicks I am there to see if I have any value to them. Some may say that the newsletter from Domaining is not included in those numbers but this month we were only featured 3 times so the traffic sent was at the least amount over the past 6 months.  Again, appreciative of the extra traffic the newsletter brings but not being a part of it as much didn’t hurt numbers. DomainShane was raised to a PR5 by Google recently and it was a very obvious increase in traffic per month.  Google traffic essentially doubled with the increase.

2. Loyalty.  How often did visitors come back? I am always curious of the quality of my traffic and it shows that 75% of it is come and go.

The first thing I was very happy about was the fact that almost 1000 people came here over 200 times this month.  Four thousand come an average of once a day.  I think that is fantastic and a great number to build on.  The other side are the 15,000 that only came once and left.  While I hope that a small percentage of that came back several times, the reality is most people that come are looking for certain information and most of the time I am not exactly what they are looking for or they read it and forget all about me.  I’ll dwell on the positive and try and build.

3. How Long Did They Stay? It gets back to above.  Most don’t stay long. This is the type of information that most site owners absolutely won’t share. It’s embarrassing

Only 5,000 each month stay longer than 10 seconds? Yep.  Can I do something to make them stay longer?  I am sure I can but that’s for another post.  At the same time that’s the Internet.  People are flying all over the place and don’t stay very long.  Especially when they are searching on Google.  A real quick fix is to make sure my site loads quickly.  That is probably a few thousand.  If my site would load instantaneously I could add more people undoubtedly.  Maybe it’s only my site but I think if others were to share their information they too would have thousands of people that leave quickly.  So rather than dwell on my shitty staying power I am going to concentrate on improving the story length and quality rather than increasing numbers. Because what good are visitors that stay 5 seconds?  As an advertiser this is the kind of info I really want.  If you tell me you got 100K visitors this month and 95K stayed for under 10 seconds then there is a different value to my advertising dollar.  As I look at my bleak amount of advertising I am noticing that my honesty here isn’t helping :).

4. 10% of our Traffic comes from mobile. I was amazed by the little amount of mobile traffic.  I remember reading Wired.com saying that 3.5% of their traffic was from mobile but that number most likely went up. So these numbers below are probably above average.

I realize 10% is still a pretty good amount. I also realize it’s increasing every year.  But I thought it could be as high as 15 given the iPad and tablets which are included in the mobile numbers and the fact we are a technology site…kind of.  I also was amazed that people used iPod touch to go to our site, 147 of them to be exact.  I guess I think of a 15 year old using an iPod touch to surf the net and an adult using an iPhone.  Again, good info but my approach is to change the layout of our site to be readable on all devices without having to devise a special mobile version.

5.  Finally, Firefox still dominates but Chrome and Safari are catching up. I think I saw a Blackberry on there.  If there is anything I can guarantee will change in these stats it’s that you won’t see very many Blackberry browsers on here next year.