Welcome to our monthly traffic report. You can find last month’s report here. 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.

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 June…

Traffic

As you can see, we received a significant amount of traffic during our third full month of blogging — 5,862 visits, according to Google Analytics.

After our home page, the pages that were most visited were an inbound lead generation blog post (elsewhere Google Analytics reported that 592 of the 1,089 viewers of this post were referred by StumbleUpon) and the growth webinar I co-hosted with Ian Altman (discussed in more detail in the Leads section below).

Conclusion #1: Traffic for the month continued to increase. The numbers are also significant, especially given that Groove’s blog is quite new.

Leads

Hubspot data revealed that our traffic and leads continued to increase month over month.

In June, blog traffic, leads, email opens, and landing page conversion rates were all up.

Notably, 5.6% of our overall site visits resulted in 339 leads, a number that is up significantly from 2.6% in April and May. This was primarily due to a webinar I co-hosted with Ian Altman. Ian sent me a significant amount of warm traffic.

Conclusion #2: Leads were significantly increased in June, due to warm traffic sent to Groove by my webinar co-host.

Traffic Acquisition

Social traffic continued to be our number one referral source, due to our significant social promotion. 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.

Close on the heels of social traffic was a considerable amount of traffic from organic search, 1,448 visits (quite an increase from 1,024 visits last month). Given how new the blog is, this is an absolutely fantastic number.

Google Analytics reveals their breakdown of traffic numbers for June:

StumbleUpon sent the most traffic of any referrer. Of course, pure traffic doesn’t tell the whole story. Google also reveals what sources are sending traffic that are actually converting to leads.

I just recently got all my goals properly configured in Google Analytics (on June 25), so the conversion by source numbers aren’t correct for the month of June. However, I can begin to see which referrers are sending the highest quality leads.

In this case, it looks like our republishing efforts on business2community are generating MUCH higher quality leads than StumbleUpon (an almost 10% conversion rate vs. an anemic 0.18% rate). I look forward to analyzing a full month worth of numbers from July to see if the trends continue.

Conclusion #3: The Groove blog received traffic from a good variety of sources, with social traffic slightly outpacing organic search. The highest quality traffic came from republishing.

Summary and Insights

• Groove’s blog is already getting significant (and increasing) traffic and leads.
• Social and organic sources are contributing a majority of traffic.
• The Groove traffic report clearly demonstrates that content marketing and social promotion can quickly provide results in the form of increased traffic.

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.