Web Traffic Summary, January 2009

by John R. SedivycloseAuthor: John R. Sedivy Name: John R. Sedivy
Email: john@capecodbranding.com
Site: http://www.capecodbranding.com
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Introduction
As a follow up to my “Web Traffic Summary, December 2008” article I am providing a summary of web traffic for the month of January. Refer to the above referenced article for the main points behind this series and what I hope to accomplish – simply stated I am providing a month-by-month summary of our web traffic goals, actual traffic levels, and our perceived rationale behind the web traffic results.

Background
Our second month was marked by two significant events. The first event was the migration from the wordpress server to our own private server. For more information on this event refer to “Blog Server Migration Part I”, and “Blog Server Migration Part II”. The second significant event was our decision to monetize the blog; refer to my series on monetization titled “To Monetize Or Not To Monetize”, “Monetize With Donations”, and “Monetize With Affiliate Marketing” for more information as to our decision to monetize as well as specifics of monetization.

Although blog server migration and monetization efforts had an impact on traffic, all was not as expected. Figure 1 provides a graphical representation of web traffic for January 2009.

Figure 1. January 2009 Web Traffic

Figure 2 provides the numerical traffic values behind the visual representation shown in Figure 1. Figure 3 provides a view of the weekly web traffic and Figure 4, a monthly view.

Figure 2. January 2009 Web Traffic Summary

Figure 3. January 2009 Weekly Web Traffic

Figure 4. January 2009 Monthly Web Traffic

Highlights
January 2009 was characterized by the following highlights:

1. January 1, 2009 – Server migration complete and monetization implemented
2. January 16 – 24, 2009 – Server down
3. January 25, 2009 – Low traffic day of 0 hits in a single day
4. January 27, 2009 – High traffic day of 1,739 hits in a single day

I will step through each of these events in greater detail.

Server Migration & Monetization
This was quite a bit of work. First we had to research how to accomplish the migration, what to expect, and finally we worked through New Year’s Eve and had the site completely migrated by New Year’s Day – January 1, 2009. Although we expected that server migration would have an impact on the traffic, the impact was somewhat unexpected. Our thought was that a major part of the impact would be from prior readers not being able to find us, however this aspect turned out to be trivial when compared to other issues that arose.

All appeared well until about January 16th when we began encountering a drastic drop in traffic. It appears that the traffic levels we were accustomed to receiving on the WordPress server were not handled well on our private server. The issue was that there just too much traffic for our server to handle – a good problem to have on Month 2 of existence! This led to our server shutting down each hour for nine days. It had taken us about five days to realize there was an issue and about four days to correct the issue.

Basically what would happen is that the server would reset each hour. When it reached the saturation point, or point where it was overloaded with traffic it would shut down. Initially this would occur late in the hour, and initially for only a few hours a day. Towards the end (when we discovered there was a problem) it was shutting down the first few minutes of a given hour!

To prevent others from feeling the pain I will provide the symptoms of the problem and how we corrected it. If we would have known there was an issue, what the symptoms were, and how to correct it, our traffic levels would have been much higher! Here were the symptoms that we saw, in order, which correspond to the traffic “depression” we witnessed from January 16 – 24:

1. Steady decrease in traffic
2. Traffic bottoms out to unrealistic levels – roughly single and double digit traffic when we were accustomed to receiving traffic in the hundreds and thousands
3. Occasional site down with only a blank screen, an error message was not present.

For a good amount of time we could bring up the blog on neither my or Amy’s computers. At some points she could bring up the blog fine with her system, but I could not – initially this led me to believe I was having an issue clearing cache – which was not the case. Eventually the site was down on both systems.

The problem was finally resolved by working with our server provider, iPowerWeb who informed us that we required an upgrade to our server to handle the increased traffic levels. The upgrade took approximately four days. Once the server was upgraded we did have another unrelated error on the server end – which iPower promptly resolved once they were made aware of the issue.

The last significant event that occurred during this month was monetization. As far as we could tell, monetization did not have an impact on traffic – this is consistent with what Steve Pavlina had reported in his article “How To Make Money From Your Blog” and therefore was not unexpected. We expect that traffic was impacted by two items, one was the server migration as previously discussed and the second was frequency of posting new content.

Refer to Table 1 for overall traffic patterns for the two months that CCBbuzz has been live.

Table 1. CCBbuzz Traffic Summary

Keep in mind that December 2008 traffic data was from the WordPress server and therefore will not be displayed on our stat counter on the new server. Note that there was a decrease in traffic from Month 1 to Month 2 of 3,542. Our initial goal was 20% higher from the preceding month which would have been 27,135 hits. Although we did not achieve this goal we are happy with the results nonetheless – here’s why. We were not expecting the influx of traffic to shutdown our server, which actually occurred on two separate occasions – again this is a good problem to have in this stage of the game, although unexpected. There were some valuable lessons learned from this that we expect will mitigate the effects of potential future problems.

Given the scope of the problems, we were expecting much worse for our traffic numbers. We offset this by stepping up our frequency during the final week. Instead of our internal goal of posting one new blog entry per day we posted four per day – instead of one post per 24 hours, we achieved one post every six hours. We accomplished this without sacrificing quality, which as all bloggers should realize is number one – content is king.

So in essence the server meltdown was a double whammy. First it prevented visitors from viewing our site and therefore we were not given credit for their traffic. Second, with the server down we were not able to post new content during that period. This added to the issue of our posting in the beginning of the month as being a bit inconsistent which we hope to rectify in February 2009. Now for the lessons learned.

One final item worth noting concerning traffic. Other sources such as LinkShare, CyStats and StatPressCN are reporting that we are showing significantly higher traffic than our current stat counter on our blog. We struggled with this for a time but believe the LinkShare, CyStats, and StatCN are including spiders and other “bots” that crawl your site for search engines – we believe our stat counter is only counting “human” visitors. LinkShare, CyStats and StatCN put us at 33,000 to 35,000, just for the month of January, where are stat counter places us at 19,070, quite a difference – we decided for the purposes of this analysis we will stick with the more conservative result until we hear otherwise.

Lessons Learned
Here are the lessons learned from this month:

1. Consistency – This was one of our lessons learned from last month, but obviously it didn’t stick. Maintain the same posting schedule consistently. Readers need to know when to look for new content and be certain that you have not abandoned your blog. Easier said than done, but we will work to improve next month.

2. Backup Content – This was another repeat from last month. One should strive to have one week of backup content available. We both seem to be procrastinators so this is a tough one – perhaps next month! Although this was a painful lesson learned, especially during the surge point where we were posting four times per day for one week – we certainly do not want to repeat that!

3. Server Monitoring – If you maintain your own server you should make an attempt to monitor your traffic levels from hour-to-hour occasionally. First, I think this is a good idea to have an idea of what your traffic pattern profile looks like over time. Second, monitoring with the help of your traffic pattern profile will help you determine if there is a trend in traffic – both good and bad. Continually, or even abnormally rising traffic is likely an indicator of stellar content. Steadily lowering traffic may be a search engine optimization (SEO) or content issue. Drastically lowering traffic is likely a technical problem.

4. Building Your Case – Regardless of how good your vendors or business partners are there is always some convincing to do – nobody, I mean nobody takes anything at face value – you are always in for a fight, especially when you are saying there is a problem on “their” end of things. The initial reaction when making a call or informing someone of an issue is that it is not their fault and you must be doing something wrong on your end. When calling tech support or informing others of problems come armed with relevant data such as when and where the problem is occurring. At the very least this will expedite resolving the problem. Personally I find I have some convincing to do internally, and then we combine forces and convince externally.
5. Set Regular Goals – Although we set monthly goals for traffic and monetization, up to this point we have not set weekly or daily goals. This will change beginning in February. The traffic declines viewed in the beginning of the month are due to inconsistent posting – I believe that if we had mini-goals leading up to the monthly goals that we would have exceeded our original monthly goal – even with the server issue, by the time we realized there was an issue we were already too far behind, even with the “big push” at the end that got us close, but not quite there. Mini-goals help “keep your eye on the ball” as well as break tasks into manageable chunks.

To summarize our second month we were off to a great start but hit a traffic “depression” due to server issues. We had a very productive month and achieved traffic levels close to our first month – not a bad feat considering our site was nearly down for nine days! Monetization efforts went off without a hitch and we are continuing with optimization of that aspect of our blog. Now that the technical issues are behind us we are ready to improve performance for our third month!

Some valuable lessons were learned and we strengthened our position during our second month!

-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding

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