October website traffic report

Data, I do love data. Except when it doesn't tell you what you want it to. All my stats are down this month but I know that's because I'm no longer visiting my site every 30 seconds to check on it or fiddle with it, so these numbers are more "real" than September's.

Firstly, Google analytics:

Users 280
New users 254
Sessions 405
Page views 1789
Avg session duration 03:54
Bounce rate 1.98% (down from 4.57% in September, so that's good)

Not bad, not great, but I'm quite happy with that. Slightly more interesting and useful is the proportions of aquisition:

Direct 41% (down from 80% due to me not visiting my site all the time)
Social 46% (up from 12% in Septeber - yay!)
Organic search 7% (more on that later with Google Search Console)
Referral 2%

And the social breakdown is this:
Twitter 40%
Pinterest 21%
Facebook 39%

Rather disappointed by the Pinterest proportion because I've been hammering that pretty hard with Tailwind, but the Facebook number is pleasant surprise.

I'm also still struggling with SEO, as borne out by the 7% of users finding my page by organic search. However, I stubbornly refuse to write content aimed at tweaking my Google ranking - I'd rather write content that's useful and relevant to my social media audience so I shouldn't really be surprised. Google Search Console tells me the following:

Clicks 22 (haha)
Impressions 1.25K
CTR 1.80%
Avg pos 53.4 (down from 73 in September so at least it's moving in the right direction)

As for Twitter, well that's going really well:

Followers 304 (up from 208 at start of October)
Impressions 34.1K
Engagement rate 1.50%
Link clicks 92
Retweets 73
Likes 238
Replies 52

All of those numbers are up so that's good.

Pinterest, as I said, is a little disappointing. No growth despite religiously pinning at least three times a day:

Impressions 19.04K
Total audience 13.83K
Engagements 501
Engaged audience 296
Facebook is also pretty static:

Page views 58
Page likes 8
Post reach 122
Post engagements 72
Page followers 7

From the affiliate side of things, good news and bad. The bad news is that as yet I have made no affiliate sales. The good news is that my ShareASale links are up from 99 in September to 360 in October. Also, I added SkimLinks to my site in October and that has led to 273 clicks. Fingers crossed people will start buying things for Christmas, and I'm making a big push for Black (Tea) Friday too.

And this morning I posted my first proper blog post for a couple of weeks, my 41st article and 38,288th word in total since mid-July. This was largely thanks to you lovely people at WA who responded so helpfully and positively to my income report yesterday. So thanks again to everyone here, and to you for reading this post. No longer feeling totally overwhelmed by it all, which is great.

Onward and upward!