It’s always interesting looking at the numbers in your Google Analytics account, it really provides you with statistics regarding everything you can possibly imagine. Often, a lot of people keep their eyes on the search statistics. How many referrals are coming from search engines, hence, the use of – and start of SEO efforts and companies solely focusing on SEO.

Anyway, I’ll give you an overview of the last month numbers for both this blog and also HattrickNews.org, as the last one is probably more interesting, having past my blog’s total page views and visits (unique) in only the last month. I always find it fascinating (and somewhat useful) to look at the Map Overlay as well to see where your visitors are actually coming from.

The Blog (9th of June – 9th of July)

     

HattrickNews.org (9th of June – 9th of July)

     

There are a couple of noticeable things here. Regarding the blog; a ‘serious’ drop in page views and visits would probably not have happened if I kept updating it as much as I did during the Euro2008. At first there was a lot of traffic coming through referrals but these referrals quite quickly resulted in visitor loyalty, more and more people kept coming through direct hits instead of referrals.

Regarding HT-News it is interesting to see that Italy and Spain are by far the most active countries visiting the site. Spain is the biggest nation in Hattrick and Italy has one of the most active communities, so no real surprises here. It’s pretty sad to see that Sweden does not even make the top 15, the motherland of Hattrick, and especially it’s community is suffering. DogNatural, a guest writer at HT-News wrote a pretty interesting piece regarding this in an article called Election Turnout: A Measure of Community Spirit.

Of course. Anyone would be interested in knowing why there’s a +90% piece of traffic coming from referring sites to HT-News. This is quite easily explained, it also explains the spikes in visits: When Hattrick goes down, it puts up a list of community sites connected to the game, HT-News is the third link in this list and the first external resource – this explains the spikes. A spike is normally equal to Hattrick downtime. The first “super spike” occurred during severe downtime, and was also the first time that HT-News was noticed on that list. Thanks! Oh, and for reference, there are indeed visits outside the spikes, it’s just a bit skewed for you guys.

There’s a bit of unfaithful visitor trends regarding HT-News which is quite worrying. Only ~10% are returning visitors which of course also could be explained by the fact that the site is fairly new – and that awareness is low among the community.

As for traffic to the blog, I don’t really care, as long as there’s mostly visits from Sweden and Australia, I know that my friends are coming by from time to time :) Considering there’s only Rick competing from Australia, I’d say he’s doing a pretty good job compared to the Swedes! Other more general and quick statistics regarding the blog are as follows: There’s a total of 358 posts on the blog with ~120 comments, it recently passed 10 000 visits (unique) and has a bit over 20 000 page views. There has been a total of 6784 spam comments posted (!?), but Akismet is fighting the war good.

When it comes to HT-News it’s always interesting to analyze stats. But, as you can see, maybe it’s time to make some SEO efforts using best practices from the blog …