Introduction
This article continues the trend of discussing our web traffic and provides a summary of web traffic activity for March 2009. The purpose of this article is to provide our readers with insight that we have gained through our analysis of web traffic trends in the hopes that it can help our readers through the information that we document as we experiment with varying approaches. March was an interesting month – we had made the conscious decision to reduce our article posting to three times a week – roughly every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday – all in all we were fairly consistent with this approach, but there is room for improvement. Sometimes the posting of articles was sporadic and this impacted our overall traffic for the month which was marked by a significant decline from the previous month.

Web Traffic Analysis
Let’s start out by reviewing our daily web traffic and overall summary of activity. Figure 1 provides a visual depiction of web traffic as measured in terms of page views.

Figure 1. March 2009 Daily Web Traffic

As may be seen in Figure 1 our highest traffic day for the month of March occurred on March 9, 2009 which corresponded to a total of 2,255 page views. The article posted on this date was “The Death Of A Brand?” which seemed to drive traffic on that day – no changes were made to the blog and posting of articles was relatively infrequent so my assumption is that it was the article content which had driven traffic. Around the time of the release of the article Starbucks had also released their Via product, which had created some activity around their brand – given that Starbucks was discussed in our article this may have driven traffic somewhat.

The second highest traffic day for the month of March was March 10, 2009. A new article was not posted on that day, and no changes were made to the blog, so again it is assumed that this was overflow traffic from “The Death Of A Brand?” article. All other days during this month were characterized by well under 1,000 page views. Why is this? My best guess is the reduction in posting frequency. Posting a new blog article basically refreshes your presence on the Internet, when new articles are not posted regularly your presence becomes stale. In addition, if you post relatively frequently, and then drop your posting frequency your readership expectations change, and this takes time to occur. Overall the more consistent you are, the better your results will be.

Let’s look at what we posted and when during this month:

1. Misconceptions Of Authority And Service – March 2, 2009
2. Web Traffic Summary, February 2009 – March 4, 2009
3. Discontinuous Change – March 7, 2009
4. The Death Of A Brand? – March 9, 2009
5. The Power Of Viral Marketing – March 11, 2009
6. The Power Of Crowds – March 16, 2009
7. A Simple Yet Profound Question – March 18, 2009
8. What Value Do You Offer? – March 20, 2009
9. Vulnerable Marketing – March 21, 2009
10. World Wide Rave? – March 23, 2009
11. Knowing Your Audience – March 25, 2009

As previously discussed we drastically reduced the posting of new articles during this month. We basically wanted to see what would occur if we dropped posting, our estimate was that traffic would drop but subscribers would increase. This did occur however in hindsight and given our refinements in monetization we are moving our strategy back to bulk traffic in lieu of subscribers. One thing that I did not account for was that great increases in traffic are motivating and really fuel growth, when a decrease occurs it has the opposite effect – even if it is a planned decrease.

Now let’s check out some detailed numbers for the month of March as shown in Table 2 below:

Figure 2. March 2009 Web Traffic Summary

Key metrics for Figure 2 are the average traffic per day which was 406, the highest web traffic day of March 9, 2009, and the lowest web traffic day of 4 page views on March 1, 2009. There was a 61% decrease in overall web traffic when compared to February 2009. Why was March 1st so low? Easy – the last article we had posted prior to March 1st, was February 18th – which was our highest traffic day – ever. At February 18th we had hit our traffic goals for the month and then dropped momentum for the remainder. This was not planned, but is really just how things played out. Not posting for 11 days definitely impacts web traffic.

Figure 3 provides the traffic summary by week; areas of interest for the month of March are 2009-10 through 2009-13.

Figure 3. March 2009 Weekly Web Traffic

Traffic during this period may be broken down as follows:

1. Week 10 (3/1 – 3/7): 2,055 page views
2. Week 11 (3/8 – 3/14): 6,157 page views
3. Week 12 (3/15 – 3/21): 2,713 page views
4. Week 13 (3/22  – 3/28): 1,545 page views

Note that Week 11 is much higher than the other three weeks as it contained our two highest days for that month. The remainder of the weeks hit an equilibrium of sorts where we fell into a groove which traffic stabilizing. Nothing phenomenal here when compared to past performance, but worth noting nonetheless for completeness.

Figure 4 provides a monthly view of web traffic for March 2009.

Figure 4. March 2009 Monthly Web Traffic

Here are the values to date for 2009:

1. January 2009: 19,070 page views
2. February 2009: 29,357 page views
3. March 2009: 12,589 page views

Nothing really new to discuss here that has not been addressed in the preceding paragraphs. One point of interest is that regardless of the reduced posting frequency we were still able to generate over 10,000 page views for the month of March, not too bad given this is only our fourth month blogging!

Lessons Learned
There weren’t too many new things that we picked up upon this month. As previously discussed we had reduced the number of articles in hopes of driving an increase in subscribers. However after finishing this month, I definitely prefer bulk traffic over subscribers. The preceding three months were exciting given the rapid growth, whereas this month was fun, but just kind of average. That being said we will be returning to our previous strategy and push forward with that.

One important takeaway is the importance of maintaining article posting frequency in a consistent manner without sacrificing the quality of your content. Quality content keeps people coming back, while fresh content on a regular basis makes them come back more often. In addition, quality content keeps people once they visit your site. I had discussed this concept in the previous web traffic articles however I believe it is worth reiterating here.

March was a great opportunity to tweak our overall approach!

-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding