April 2014 Traffic Report

Welcome to our first monthly traffic report. We began blogging on Groove middle of March 2014, so this traffic report will provide insight into the results that can be expected from a new blog.

We hope that our traffic reports will demonstrate what is working when it comes to establishing a brand new blog. It is our hope that this report will help you as you evaluate your own level of investment in content marketing.

If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.

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What Do We Look For in Our Traffic Report?

The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer what we want to know most each month.

When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with the questions you’d like to have answered. Here’s what we suggest:

1. Is overall traffic up or down? Why?
2. Are overall leads up or down? Why?
3. Which traffic/referral sources are contributing the most to traffic and leads?
4. How can we adjust our strategy to increase traffic and leads?

Here’s what I found for March…

Traffic

As you can see, we received a significant amount of traffic during our first full month of blogging — 3,851 visits, according to Google Analytics.

The cyclical dips in traffic coincide with each weekend, when we did little to no content publication or promotion, and when people are less likely to be visiting business blogs.

Conclusion #1: Traffic for our first month was significant, given that Groove’s blog is new.

Leads

I don’t have Google Analytics configured correctly for conversions yet, so I’ll rely on HubSpot’s lead data, which show that in April we captured over 100 leads. I’d venture to say that’s a much bigger number than the vast majority of websites, even well-established ones or those with higher traffic. Our success in this area is due to the back end system we’ve designed for lead capture (the “engine” behind our inbound marketing process).

Conclusion #2: Overall lead capture was 2.6% of total traffic.

Traffic Acquisition

Our largest source of traffic was organic search with 1,115 visits. Considering how new the blog is, this is an absolutely fantastic number.

In second was referral traffic, then direct, and then social. Given that we significantly increased our social promotion on LinkedIn in the last week of the month, I would expect that social will very likely be #1 or #2 in May. If you are thinking that social promotion requires a huge investment of time, you’d only be partially correct. Thanks to HubSpot’s social inbox extension for the Chrome browser, promoting our content is actually quite efficient.

Conclusion #3: While the Groove blog received traffic from a good variety of sources, organic search contributed more traffic than any other source.

[Tweet “Check out how much traffic this new blog is getting — thanks to smart #contentmarketing strategies”]

Summary and Insights

• Groove’s blog is already getting significant traffic and leads.
• Organic sources are contributing a significant portion of traffic.
• The Groove traffic report clearly demonstrates that content marketing can quickly provide results in the form of increased traffic.

Be sure to subscribe today so you’ll be notified of next month’s traffic report, especially since we have just begun (as of April 28) publishing content on a daily basis — you won’t want to miss the results!

Trent Dyrsmid writes at BrightIdeas.co, where he shares proven marketing strategies you can use to attract more traffic, increase conversions, and maximize profits. For bright ideas on how leverage content marketing and marketing automation, join his free newsletter.