Analyzing my refered traffic from Ababsurdo!

I wanted to start this post off by saying the map on the left is a representation of who reads my blog. The bigger the circle, the more times my blog has been read there. So, that being said, the largest circle is actually Fenton, MI (with 79 visits), however, all data from Fenton stops on July 4^th, and all Linden data begins on July 5^th (I see a pattern here that makes a lot of sense.) The number two city to view my blog is Linden, MI. In conclusion to this, my biggest fan is my mom. ;-)

Here is a list of the top 10 cities that read my blog:

1. Fenton/Linden, MI: 156
2. Bellevue, WA: 113
3. Seattle, WA: 90
4. (not set): 72 <-- This is the governent spying on me ;-P
5. Ann Arbor, MI: 33
6. Troy, MI: 22
7. Glenwood Springs, CO: 15
8. Kirkland, WA: 14
9. Allendale, WA: 11
10. Medina: WA: 9

So, to the comparison... as a googleholic, it would only be proper to use Google Analytics to monitor statistics related to traffic on my site. So, to simplify things, I decided I wanted a couple pictures to look at, so I made this:

I wasn't sure what to think at first. It shows that I have between 31 - 59 visits to my site via ababsurdo.com, and it shows that 4 to 9 of those visits are quality visits. It also shows that I get between 71 - 90 visits per month to my blog, and 11 to 19 of those are quality visits. So, I got to thinking, what is the impact of ababsurdo on my blog?
So, I made another picture:



I love making pictures... anyway, this one shows that 34 - 74% of my visits come from Ababsurdo, and 23 - 63% of my quality visits come from there. So, can I actually draw a conclusion from this? well, yea... sort of.

See, this is a reflection of my ability to reach my target audience... family. Also, Ababsurdo is a daily blog, my blog is a randomly updated blog. This means that by slacking off too much, I am lowing the quality of the visits to my blog. My over all bounce rate is about 80%, and when you look at this chart:



You can see from this chart that there is a slight, but consistent change in the bounce rate when compared to the number of blog posts per month. You can see that my bounce rate was the lowest in August and the % of days that I blogged in August was the highest. However, in September my bounce rate started to go up as the % of days I blogged went down.

This suggests that If I can just consistently blog every day, my bounce rate will go down, and my quality visits will go up.

I know that I've read this before on many blogs about professional blogging, but it is just nice to look at real world data, and come to the same conclusions based on that.

My final piece of information, when I look back at the progress of my blog over the past 3 weeks, I can see a direct relationship between bounce rate and number of posts.

• September 28^th - October 4^th: 3 blog posts; 70% bounce rate
• October 5^th - October 11^th: 2 blog posts; 79% bounce rate
  
• October 12^th - October 18^th: 3 blog posts; 73% bounce rate

There is one thing that is crutial about the past 3 weeks, the first and last week had about 14% fewer visitors than the middle week. However, if I had posted more in the middle week, I probably would have had fewer bounces because more of the visitors would read the blog.

So, after looking at all of this, and a bunch of data from my daily statistics, I should post every day, with the highest priority on friday (I get the most visits on Friday and Saturday).

That's it for now.

Later,
SteveO