TechWag

How much traffic do you really get

Posted on November 21st, 2008 by admin

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeEveryone is always watching where their traffic comes from, and most of us use some form of monitoring on their web sites to see where their traffic is coming from, and what it looks like. One of the things that people often overlook is the influence of someone’s RSS feed as part of that traffic statistic.

If you are focusing on your readership, think of your RSS feed as those folks who will support you, and web traffic as the general drive by traffic that you want to have sign up for your RSS feed.

As a great example, here is a quick statistic about traffic here on this web site. If I was to only pay attention to what I gather at Icerocket as shown below, there are a lot of questions. The two arrows point to a major hacking incident in April on the blog (where hackers p0wned the site for a few weeks) and the second arrow shows where we started mucking about with a design change (the design change and an increase in traffic, interesting combination).

If you add to that though the RSS feed traffic statistics from Feedburner, the picture completely changes, and adds an additional 60% of people seeing the blog on average via their favorite feed reader. Please note, nothing has been done to pump RSS readers’ either, no tricks involved.

This is where things get interesting, so if I have 200 people hit my web site, actually come and visit, I’ll have 220 to 250 people read the RSS feed and never visit the web site. My RSS feed in essence is as important as or more important than the actual web site for generating readership.

If you are not paying enough attention to your RSS feed, how it works, if it works, and how to track its use, then you are missing an important viewpoint into who your readers are, and how many of them there are in total. This is the important part to remember, if you are generating statistics for who is coming to your web site and how they are consuming your information, the information from your RSS feed adds the extra dimensionality that you will need to know what really is happening on your site. Adding the two numbers together puts me somewhere around 6,000 to 10,000 people a month reading the articles I write. If I only believed icerocket, then the numbers might actually be fairly depressing, at 3 to 6 thousand people per month.

The bonus is that while I am not tracked by comscore, or any of the other major internet traffic monitoring systems, I can make a cogent argument for someone that wants to sponsor the blog. I can say that 6 to 10K people per month will read this blog, so here is what the charge sheet looks like. You can also embed an image in your RSS feed for the sponsor so that they can also track readership.

The combined number is much more compelling than what is seen from an either or case, and while 10K is a drop in the bucket when it comes to readership on the internet, for some this is a decent number. It means that you have a base readership, people that will continue to come back (all those RSS readers are your “base”) while everyone else who pops along for a visit may or may not sign up for the RSS feed.

If you are focusing on your readership, think of your RSS feed as those folks who will support you, and web traffic as the general drive by traffic that you want to have sign up for your RSS feed. When compiling readership stats for someone, or even just for yourself, do not forget to add the statistics from your RSS feed into the mix as well. If you do not, you could be missing out on a significant amount of traffic.

Tags: Feedburner, statistics, icerocket, readers, numbers, growth curve, web site, blog, interesting