Blog Metrics

July 7, 2010

I was recently asked if I thought the blog tour was worthwhile. It was a specific question, so I looked at the website metrics.

Month	Page Loads	Unique Visitors	First Time Visitors	Returning Visitors
Jul 2010	840	517	446	71
Jun 2010	7,313	3,248	2,662	586
May 2010	10,049	5,282	4,464	818
Apr 2010	18,135	6,855	5,919	936
Mar 2010	18,896	8,361	7,519	842
Feb 2010	6,041	4,379	3,927	452
Jan 2010	5,287	3,847	3,317	530

The tour began a little early, in mid-to-late March and ran through April. As you can see, my page loads jumped from 6,041 in February to 18,896 and 18,135 in March and April, when I was on active blog tour. Even in May, when the blog tour was basically over, my numbers were high, with page loads slightly over 10,000 for the month. It's dropped down again even though overall numbers are increased over pre-blog tour dates.

Unique visitors also jumped significantly, particularly in March. First-time visitors jumped through the roof in March and stayed pretty high in April. Returning visitors were consistent with the overall increases, too. (I wish they were higher overall, but hey, I cherish each and every one of you. Would I be even happier if I had hits like John Scalzi's Whatever blog, with something like 40,000 unique visitors daily? Uh, yeah.)

So was the blog tour worthwhile? Yes, definitely.