Its that time of month again when we take a look at the previous month stats, most popular posts and referrers.
August was slightly down in page views month over month to 9,433,840 (down from
10,091,475) and the average unique daily users was also down to 48,730 from 52,599. If August wasn't a holiday season then I would start to look at why page views and users have been declining.
Some of the things I would look into are...
Down time - were there any outages and if so for how long? How many users were affected? What is causing downtime - network/hardware/software?
I'm changing the UI all the time - at which point of time did page views/users start to decline? Has the new UI affected the ability for users to navigate?
Content - have I started to lean towards a particular type of content? Apart from event coverage time, I do try to keep a balance of content as I know there are many of you who are here for a specific topic - some are here for everything while others are here for Gundam or Figures or Eroge or Idols...
I still have not posted the enterprise booth stuff from the Comike for example because there would be an eroge overload in a short space of time.
Have there been enough IU posts? An Incremental User Post is a post which many people like to talk about and link to - thus bringing in new incremental users. Many users will loose interest in this site over time (known as churn) and it's important to make up for that loss by generating new users - just like any business really.
An example of a IU Post is the Wooden Supercar - generated a ton of traffic.
The above is an example of a healthy site. Notice how after a spike of users, the original traffic goes up from "A" to "B" - the difference is incremental users. The percentage is usually small - about 5-10%. Expecting all new visitors to the site to become incremental users is unrealistic.
The above is an example of an unhealthy site with continued churn. The site generates a buzz which brings in traffic but users dont stay around. The user arrived usually because they clicked on something they liked but why didnt they come back for more?
One of the main reasons is poor discoverability and navigation - the user could not discover anything else that they liked. UI and discoverability improvements to this site contributed to the 100+% incremental growth in traffic since March.
Most users are unlikely to go dig around a site that they visit for the first time so its our job to make it easy for them to discover something that they may like.
I get thousands of users a day through Google. Has Google changed their ranking algorithm? If so then I need to look at the structure of the HTML to see what needs tweaking so that I can get back up in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). Read how a change in the Google ranking algorithm called "Big Daddy" changed how many pages got ranked and indexed.
Etc - will go into that etc some other time ^^
Anyway, back to the post. Most popular posts this month were...
Notable referrers of the month were...
And many many thanks to everybody else who drove traffic to the site.
I noticed hundreds of member signups when I posted the
Dengeki Hime post and I presume it was to use the nosebleed function ^o^
I also noticed that many of you who did sign up also registered a url. Do remember that I am open to sharing dannychoo.com users through the
Featured Feeds feature. If you would like a boost in traffic then it makes sense to share.
This month you can expect coverage from the
Tokyo Game Show (
see last years coverage here), and I will also be heading off to Los Angeles for the
Imprint Conference. Also expect a few feature launches too ^^
Once again I would like to thank all of you for your continued support. Domo Arigato!
