Travel Website Statistics: November 2013
November has come and gone and Lunaguava seems to have plateaued.
We’re currently averaging 1000 visits per month, which suits our non-existing goals fine. Our mindset is still firmly low-key, and although making strides in the travel blogging community we are happily swimming (or floating?) in a picturesque pond with the rest of the little fish.
Nonetheless, I’ve spent some time tweaking the site so it loads faster and have attempted to stop the continuous flow of spam eating away our bandwidth (curse you, China!). This has been done by disallowing comments on most pages and on posts which are older than 2 months. Although far from perfect, it seems to have diminished the onslaught.
Before I go on with the numbers, here’s my travel blogger motto, courtesy of Dylan Moran: “Your potential is like your bank balance, you always have a lot less than you think”.
Website statistics NOVEMBER 2013
Social Media
Subscribers: 23
Facepoop: 211
Twitter: 270
Google+: 33
StumbleUpon: 2
Pinterest: 14
Klout: 56
Going for a rundown here:
Subscribers – I’ve read everywhere that this should be a top priority, but I still haven’t managed to find time or patience to tackle it properly. Maybe next month?
Facepoop – We had a bit of a jump in “Likes” on our Facepoop page, which has brought us much merriment and the occasional singalong. Nonetheless, I must address a couple of things:
1. Facepoop is our biggest traffic referral platform at the moment. Our readership is still mostly comprised of (very, very cool) friends, and they get their regular Lunaguava fix through our Facepoop updates. Hence, we’re happy to see it grow.
2. Facepoop is crap. Lord Zuckerberg has been trying to monetize his not-really-original geeky golden chicken, and Facepoop Pages like Lunaguava are being squeezed for a bit of cash in the form of Boost ransoms – even though we have 200+ followers, only about 10% of them actually see the updates we post. The idea? Page owners pay up to “Boost” their posts, therefore ensuring a wider audience. This may be fine and dandy for Nike or the Biebster, but we’re not willing to part with 20 bucks every time we want a deaf aunt to see we’re still alive.
Twitter – I’ve been mostly absent from Twitter chats, which has had a detrimental impact in our follower growth. Nonetheless, we had a boost late in the month, courtesy of a travel community we’ve recently joined. I’m still stubbornly sticking to organic growth, so am not counting on any sudden spurts of activity.
Google+ – As a travel blogger, I am Faust to Google’s Mephistopheles, and have relinquished my soul for a couple of traffic hits. As a result, I’ve created a couple of Google+ accounts, so you might go ahead and add FW North to your circles and follow Lunaguava on Google+!
Nonetheless, I must admit G+ has been a surprisingly enticing social media platform. Although still overshadowed by mighty Facepoop, we are seeing some unexpected growth there. Time will tell if it will become something bigger. For now, we are enjoying posting photos to several communities and hopefully gaining a bit more visibility for our website.
One minor quibble though: what’s up with all the seemingly horny middle-aged (and not so equidistantly aged) men popping up whenever a female of the species makes even the most modest appearance? Bit creepy, guys – you should know this by now…
StumbleUpon – I’ve finally made up my mind to dwell a bit on this particular platform, and am proud to announce I sort of understand it. I’ve been spending some time dealing with the inner workings of StumbleUpon, and am seeing some traffic coming our way because of it. Still in its early stages, but looks promising.
Pinterest – We’ve joined Pinterest! Since we have so many photos, we thought we’d share them in one neat spot, while also gathering photos from other travelers along the way. We’re off with 14 followers at the moment, but could always welcome more (I strive for the obvious, I know). The other bit of news is that our Pinterest page is curated by the lady Elle, so it’s much more tasteful than whatever stuff I put here.
Klout – This site uses social media analytics to assess how influential one is in the mad kingdom of the interwebs. Lunaguava has a score of 56 out of 100 – same as last month, meaning I haven’t been as active in social media circles as I probably should have. But c’mon, we have Lake Atitlán calling us!
Website Statistics
(Google Analytics) (01/11 – 30-11)
Monthly Visits: 1,094
Monthly Unique Visitors: 706
Page Views: 2269
Avg. Visit Duration: 3:49
Pages/Visit: 2.07
% New Visits: 58.04%
Bounce Rate: ~66.73%
Google Page Rank: N/A
Domain Authority: 27/100
Page Authority: 36/100
As mentioned above, we’ve apparently reached our comfort zone, which is about 1000 views per month. There have been some interesting developments though: we have less new visits, but those who make the leap are sticking around longer and seeing more pages. This is probably due to our videos, which not only provide a better glimpse into our traveling lives than my silly words but also increase the time spent on the website.
You know what this means, folks: more videos to come, hopefully as colorful as our home by Lake Atitlán!
The last batch of statistics belongs to two sites which keep track of traffic rank. We’re slowly making our mark in the ethereal realms of the interwebs, and are confident it will never get much better than this. Yes, I’m a natural born optimist…
Alexa:
Overall Ranking: 241,603
US Ranking: 97,298
Sites Linking In: 45
SEMRush:
3,938,742 (US)
And so it goes… Thank you for visiting and drop a comment if so inclined (I’m a fantastic salesman – Willy Loman’s got nothing on me). In the meantime, here’s a politically-charged graffiti from San Pedro La Laguna:
How ’bout that? 1,000+ views and 0 illness! Who’d have thought? 😉 Congrats!
Ha! Yeah, I guess we can maybe keep it up without tales of medical woes. Thanks for stopping by, Deia! Good luck!
Good job guys! Facebook is indeed Facepoop, I heard they only show your posts to something like 15% of your followers too! And they constantly blast you for paying $30 to “boost” your posts. Um, no thank you!
Keep up the good work 🙂 Enjoying reading your adventures so far!
Thanks a lot, Samantha! We’ve been trying to find alternatives to Facepoop, not even because of dwindling exposure but out of principle. They’re not playing nice with us small folk… Good luck!
Many thanks for this FW, an important reminder that my efforts with monthly wraps –something I had planned to do from the get-go– have been woefully inadequate. 🙂
Haha! You’re welcome, Bob. These posts are not everybody’s favorite, but I hope they are of interest to the travel blogging community. Safe travels!
Hi guys, I’d like to put in a plug for Akismet. The Chinese haven’t figured a way around it yet. At least for the most part. It saves me volumes of time sifting through spam comments. Thanks for sharing your stats … I wish we had the subscribers you do. 😉 Good job all around the block.
Hola Linda! We use Akismet as well, and it does indeed block all the spam from showing up on the website. But I was referring to something else: whenever spam is picked up Akismet, it means it already made to the site. Although it won’t show up on the comments, it still counts as an unwelcome visit, thus inflating our bandwidth usage (not to mention it’s annoying seeing more spam bots visiting the site than actual people). The ideal would be to have a tool which would prevent the spam bots from even entering the site, like a magnetic shield. I’m currently experimenting with CloudFlare, but am still in the early stages. Thanks a lot for stopping by and good luck!
As always I love your site. I’ve been so busy traveling with the holidays that I need to do a lot of catching up on reading. I really enjoyed your post on your December funds and hope you stop your quest to spend all of your money on medical. Happy Healthy New Year!
Thank you so much for your support! It’s much appreciated. Happy cinematic New Year!