Here are the complete statistics on visits to my puzzle pages during the month of April:
| Day | Visitors | Visits | Pageviews | Pages/Visit | Avg. Time on Site |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| April 1 | 30 | 34 | 165 | 4.85 | 04:49 |
| April 2 | 26 | 34 | 292 | 8.59 | 05:53 |
| April 3 | 13 | 17 | 62 | 3.65 | 10:35 |
| April 4 | 29 | 35 | 152 | 4.34 | 04:28 |
| April 5 | 17 | 22 | 72 | 3.27 | 13:31 |
| April 6 | 16 | 19 | 518 | 27.26 | 03:43 |
| April 7 | 22 | 24 | 40 | 1.67 | 00:59 |
| April 8 | 19 | 23 | 113 | 4.91 | 04:43 |
| April 9 | 31 | 36 | 70 | 1.94 | 00:57 |
| April 10 | 41 | 46 | 94 | 2.04 | 03:06 |
| April 11 | 21 | 24 | 77 | 3.21 | 06:17 |
| April 12 | 31 | 40 | 243 | 6.08 | 06:38 |
| April 13 | 24 | 25 | 182 | 7.28 | 07:59 |
| April 14 | 29 | 33 | 172 | 5.21 | 05:06 |
| April 15 | 20 | 24 | 98 | 4.08 | 05:07 |
| April 16 | 24 | 38 | 188 | 4.95 | 05:49 |
| April 17 | 17 | 26 | 123 | 4.73 | 04:31 |
| April 18 | 10 | 11 | 32 | 2.91 | 04:22 |
| April 19 | 23 | 24 | 73 | 3.04 | 01:30 |
| April 20 | 28 | 37 | 171 | 4.62 | 04:21 |
| April 21 | 33 | 36 | 164 | 4.56 | 08:14 |
| April 22 | 46 | 53 | 242 | 4.57 | 07:05 |
| April 23 | 49 | 52 | 168 | 3.23 | 05:09 |
| April 24 | 33 | 43 | 177 | 4.12 | 09:47 |
| April 25 | 42 | 52 | 198 | 3.81 | 05:57 |
| April 26 | 42 | 51 | 371 | 7.27 | 18:38 |
| April 27 | 76 | 93 | 370 | 3.98 | 08:53 |
| April 28 | 35 | 52 | 323 | 6.21 | 11:47 |
| April 29 | 31 | 44 | 211 | 4.80 | 11:52 |
| April 30 | 36 | 46 | 245 | 5.33 | 14:45 |
Here’s a subset of the same data graphically; Visits are in blue (left axis) and Visitors are in orange (right axis). (The plot isn’t exact.):
(Click to enlarge)
Lessons
If you squint real hard at the data, you can see a slight upward trend in traffic. Overall, though, nothing too interesting happened this month. We did learn some things:
- The Adword’s Quality Score of a page/ad/keyword combination is tremendously important to the cost-effectiveness of a campaign, and frighteningly arbitrary. You can raise your Quality Score by creating special landing pages, including special pages on specially-crafted domains.
- Adwords can drive traffic to a site, but usually at $0.10 CPC or more. If you’re going to use it, you better have a monetization strategy.
- If you’re planning to advertise with Adwords, be sure your domain name is 31 characters or less.
- CoolText.com and CrossBrowserTesting.com are useful services.
- Google Gadgets aren’t necessarily fully-baked.
Moving Forward
This month, I’ll continue with the daily posts, and I’ll continue to guarantee you original content on Fridays. I’m going to stop dedicating my weekday posts to a single topic, however: that seemed a little monotonous. That said, I expect most of this month’s posts will revolve around one of two (perhaps surprising) topics:
- The iPhone. I went out and bought myself a Mac Mini this week (to go with my keyboard, I suppose). I’d signed up for the iPhone developer program a few months ago, and think it’s now time to try developing some applications for that platform. I’m sure it will be interesting.
- People. Let’s face it: Code is nice and all, but it’s people that make the world go ’round. It seems like a good idea to think about how they work.
Hopefully, these two threads will come together in the not too distant future. Thanks for reading, and please come back Monday for Day 1 of the iPhone adventure!
