Google Analytics: Crunching Numbers

We’re nearing the end of our second year of existence, and our first full calendar year here at Digital Firefly. The staff was interested in knowing how our website performed in terms of things like visits, and page views, so we ran a Google Analytics report. As we took a look at the findings, we decided that we’d like to share them here with you.

• We had a total of 30,216 Visitors in 2012

Of those visitors, 25,216 were unique, meaning that they were coming to our site for the very first time. This is an important number. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”.

• We had a total of 57,128 Page Views in 2012

This number refers to the individual amount of pages that have been viewed this year. Not too shabby.

• There was an average of 1.89 pages per visit

This is a very important figure. This means that once visitors came to the site they didn’t leave after the viewed a page. They stuck around, and checked out other pages on our site. As such, the average time spent on our site was 1 minute, 55 seconds.

• 65.14% of visits came from the United States

This is not surprising, as our site is hosted here in New Jersey. The next country with the highest number of visits was the United Kingdom, at 6.48%, and 1,964 views. The only other country with over 1,000 views was India with 1,025. If the number of views in the United Kingdom continues to increase in 2013 it might be a worthwhile investment to host a site there.

• Our most successful blog was “How can a business like another business on Facebook with timeline?”

This blog was by far our most popular of the year with 5,193 views. To give you an idea of how big this number is, our home page received 6,596 views, and the next most popular blog received 1,452.

• We had the most traffic on December 11, 2012

This was right after we posted Marissa’s blog about Bad Logo Design. That day, we had a total of 427 visits.

• 4,247 of our visits came from the mobile site

We launched our mobile site this year, and as the numbers show, it helped increase our traffic.

It is very important to look at the source of your traffic, or where your traffic is coming from. In 2012, most of our traffic came from Google searches. This is a great sign, because it means that people are searching for a full- service, digital marketing agency and they came upon our site. The second most source of traffic was the number of people who came to our site directly. Clearly these are returning customers, or prospects and they were already familiar with our brand. The third biggest source of traffic was Facebook. Facebook was by far our best social media platform, as the regular site, and mobile site ranked higher than any other social networking site.

We also wanted to break some more numbers down, and find out how we did when compared to 2011. Here are some comparisons to last year:

• Visits were up 851.62% from last year

Obviously this is due in large part to the face that we only came into existence last summer. However, when you take the period of July 26 through December 20 of last year, and compare it to the same time frame as this year, we were still up an impressive 506.99%.

• Unique Visitors were up 919.61%

Once again this figure might be a bit high since 2012 was our first calendar year, but, when comparing to the same period we existed last year this number is up 560.67%. Not too bad for a digital marketing firm that just celebrated its first anniversary a few short months ago.

• Page views were up 602.74%

When comparing this figure to the period of existence from last year, page views were still up 326.21%.

It’s not surprising that all of our figures were up from the previous year. With a growing company, and a growing site, it was inevitable that we would receive more traffic. As we always preach- things like regular social media posts and constant blog entries drive traffic, and we posted much more content in 2012 than we did in 2011.

In 2013, it is essential that we keep coming up with content. The more content we create, the more others will link to our page. As already explained, our best source of traffic was Google searches, so by increasing our links we will continue to increase our page rank. Also, we will continue to post regular content on social media sites, Facebook in particular. Facebook has proven to be an effective social media tool for us, and we will continue to use it in 2013.

Lastly, we have you to thank. If you are reading this, then you are partially responsible for our surge in traffic in 2012. We couldn’t have done all of this without you. Thank you for your support in 2012, and we hope you have a happy and healthy new year!