What do May Flowers bring? … Pilgrims!

Now that my urge to tell bad jokes is out of the way, let’s take a look at what’s changed in this month’s traffic patterns (comparing March 1-30 to April 1-30). Not that I have amazing traffic, but it’s always good to see what people are finding the blog and what topics they seem to gravitate too.

Have I mentioned that I am slightly addicted to Google Analytics?

Overall Traffic Report

417 Visits vs 236 (+76.69%)
1,041 Pageviews vs 493 (+111.16%)
2.50 Pages/Visit vs 2.09 (+19.50%)
67.15% Bounce Rate vs 72.88% (-7.87%)
00:02:53 Avg. Time on Site vs 00:01:48 (+59.94%)
83.69% % New Visits vs 94.07% (-11.03%)

Good metrics from the visits and increase in returning visitors, although a good chunk of that seems to be due to the Great Blog Noblegarden Egg Hunt. Still, it’s nice to see the increase in folks hanging around.

I’m going to try focusing in this month on writing more posts that follow April’s traffic patterns. No more egg hunts, alas, but I’m going to try and be more blog-interactive (through Blog Azeroth and other avenues).

Traffic Source Report

26.38% Direct Traffic vs 36.44% (-27.61%)
17.27% Referring Sites vs 19.92% (-13.30%)
56.35% Search Engines va 43.64% (+29.12%)

Direct traffic is down, but in reality it’s only down by 1. The changes here are all based on the fact that Google and my Sitemaps are finally playing nice. This means my content will start pulling in the eyeballs as opposed to folks who already know I exist (or who are following non-Google links here).

Which leads me to recommend Google XML Sitemaps a WordPress plugin written by Arne Brachhold. Between that and Google Webmaster Tools, I’ve finally started to show up on searches. (Not that many people are clicking, but it’s a start!)

April’s top 10 (35 Total)

• custom model horses (8)
• mystique theme edit (5)
• mystique theme hacks (4)
• arabian6 (3)
• https://martha.net/ (3)
• mandi hickman micro minis (3)
• story prompts (3)
• martha.net (3)
• 4.1.0 druid dps (2)
• druid 4.1.0 (2)

The most obvious change is the fact that the search terms are now focused on the content of the website instead of my name. (Darn you Martha Stewart!). What’s left of the name-based searches are my actual website address, which raises the chance that these people are looking for me and not my famous counterparts.

The scary bit is that arabian6 is apparently a search term for a p0rn site… but one of the three people looking for it decided to hang around and check out this website instead. Which is odd, but apparently they are easily amused and/or distracted.

The Mystique hack posts are doing well and I have a bunch more in the wings. Nothing like crashing the PHP code to pass the time! Plus I finally figured out how to get the background to work (I think) so those should be rolling out this month.

It’s odd that Mandi is on the list since she isn’t in the model horse hobby anymore, but I guess it’s time to to bump the last of Mandi Hickmans’s micro resins into the Custom-Models.com queue. Which means getting the new lightbox finished (urk).

Am just glad that the Custom Model Horses is finally showing up higher in the results! 😀

Not that I wouldn’t love for the other categories to show up as well, but since the site is 80% writing, 18% horses and 2% everything else… yeah.

All in all, a good month… am looking forward to seeing how May compares!