First month over month drop in site visits.. this is hard work

October 1, 2012 No category 3

All of you who run a web site or a blog will probably be able to relate to this. The first month you see a drop in visits. It happened to me for the first time today. Looking at the month of September, I see the first ever  drop in visitors to the Excel Liberation site

wait .. I did change the color scheme. Could it be that?

But when i look at this blog, which is a companion for the Excel Ramblings site, it’s the same story, with the first ever drop in September – and there’s been no change in format in that.

So what happened in September? Simple – I’ve been too busy to post much , nor to add much content. In all, I’ve added content at about one third the usual rate. To keep growth, it seems you have to relentlessly add content at a matching rate.
Any site owners care to share their experiences ? How was September for you?

 

About brucemcp 225 Articles
I am a Google Developer Expert and decided to investigate Google Apps Script in my spare time. The more I investigated the more content I created so this site is extremely rich. Now, in 2019, a lot of things have disappeared or don’t work anymore due to Google having retired some stuff. I am however leaving things as is and where I came across some deprecated stuff, I have indicated it. I decided to write a book about it and to also create videos to teach developers who want to learn Google Apps Script. If you find the material contained in this site useful, you can support me by buying my books and or videos.
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3 Comments

  1. Bruce, great site and content.

    Regarding the end of traffic growth, this happened to me in June. Since then traffic has been flat or slightly declined. It happened just after I published an optimistic outlook after my first year of blogging with good growth: http://visualign.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/view-stats-for-first-year-of-visualign/

    Some portion of growth/decline seems directly attributable to content volume. But at some point the quality of the content would seem to matter regarding whether you can acquire new viewers and break into new levels. Also the virility, i.e. the likelihood with which people who like what they see will forward it to others.

    Lastly, I noticed that a significant portion of my views comes from Google image searches. I did not expect that and I'm not sure exactly what to make of this or how to leverage it (i.e. better tagging of images). Any thoughts on that?

    Cheers, Thomas.

  2. Thanks for your comments Thomas.

    I do have a bit of a theory about September. Like your site, The majority of visits are during the week. In fact I typically have 3x on weekdays versus weekend days. I notice that September actually had 10 weekend days (and of course only 30 days), so that more than accounts for the 4% drop I saw. However it does nevertheless show a slowdown in growth. I agree about the content staleness .. I always try to venture into some new area each month (september excluded).. new visitor rate has been pretty constant at about 75%, about 50% search and 50% referred.

    You are right about the image searches actually – I never bother tagging them – i know I should but I haven't had the energy to go back and do it. There are so many – thanks for reminding me

    btw i notice you are interested in sankey diagrams from your blog .. you mention maybe from excel one day .. here's a kludge to get them out of excel..

    https://ramblings.mcpher.com/Home/excelquirks/d3/sankey

    Bruce

  3. Bruce,

    Thanks for pointing this out. I have included your link in the comments to my Sankey post. I should experiment a bit more with D3.js – however I need to first move my Blog to a hosting service other than WordPress.com (they won't allow any JavaScript, iframe or other active content). For interactive visualizations this is a must, however.

    One more thought on the view stats: What I found sobering was the very small amount of comments one gets as a percentage of pageviews. It may have to do with the general participation inequality – most people are lurkers, very few are creators, see my post http://visualign.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/inequality-on-twitter/ I often wonder how some folks are able to generate an active community with lots of comments and questions. My Blog has about 300x more pageviews than comments (even including my own comments). As you said – this is hard work!

    Thomas.

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