Although I have an economics degree I’m a closet mathmo and I actually got into my university to study maths, but I changed subjects after a few weeks when I realised studying maths full-time wasn’t fun. That’s why I’m a big believer in using blog traffic statistics to improve the experience for readers and to identify site improvements that will drive additional page views.
At the moment, Windows 7 News is my biggest site and I’ve been working hard with my business partner Martin from gHacks to grow the site. One of the tasks I’ve been focusing on over the last month is analysing my mint and Google Analytics stats to find ways to optimise the site. Although my changes haven’t been the only reason that the site traffic has doubled over the last month to nearly 60k page views per day, I believe it has definitely helped.
Here are some of the changes I’ve made to Windows 7 News because of the trends I saw in the site stats.
Landing Page: New Introduction On Homepage
The Windows 7 News homepage accounts used to account for around 30-40% of all traffic thanks to lots of Google traffic from users searching for ‘Windows 7′, ‘Windows 7 News’ etc. When I looked at what these new users were seeing I decided that it wasn’t appropriate for users to see the latest blog post. So, I created a landing page with links to the top sections of the site to try and reduce the bounce rate on the page.
The landing section still needs a bit of work and we will refine it over the next couple of weeks, but the results are looking good with the homepage now accounting for less than 20% of total page views.
Custom Tag Pages
Reviewing the most visited pages made me realise that some of our tag pages were getting a lot of Google traffic. For instance the Windows 7 Release Date tag page is currently the 3-4th most visited page. Displaying the default tag template page (example below) wasn’t very appealing to readers:
Martin provided instructions on how to create a WordPress Custom Tag page which I used to add a ‘landing page’ at the top of the tag pages that are getting a lot of google traffic:
These new custom tag pages are now helping to provide readers with useful information, and to drive them deeper into the site
Rewriting Top Posts
Ensuring that top posts are fresh and contain the latest information can help maintain Google rankings even if it is an old post, as Google checks for content updates. Using a stats package can make finding these posts easier.
Added New Screenshots And Wallpaper Galleries
Another big change that I made to the site based on analysing my stats was changing the way we displayed images on our Windows 7 Screenshots and Windows 7 Wallpapers pages. These pages are very popular, but we were displaying images as popups which meant not only was it was hard for readers to navigate galleries, but we were also missing out on valuable full page and banner impressions.
I realised the implications of this when I saw pages with funny names because of the image names appearing in the stats, so I added the NextGen gallery plugin. Not only did this provide a great way for users to navigate several galleries in one go driving up average page views, but each image view is now a full page impression.
Fixing broken links
The final change I’ve made based on reviewing my blog stats, is to fix broken urls. Over time every site will have broken links, but surprisingly some of these pages still receive a lot of traffic. I’ve fixed a handful of major pages, which has ‘saved’ a few thousand impressions per day.
Do you have any examples of insights you’ve had and changes you’ve made because of trends spotted in your site stats?
