If you are a regular reader of the blog then you couldn’t help but notice that we were listed in the Globe and Mail’s “Best of the Blogs” competition this week. Rob Carrick who is the top personal finance journalist in Canada (and clearly a pretty brilliant guy) picked our blog as one of his favourites. This was a big deal for us because it generated a lot of traffic that was not only plentiful but of high quality since it’s fairly likely that some readers of the Globe and Mail Business section would be interested in our blog and will hopefully become regular readers.
One of our long time readers, Guinness416 who has a blog of her own called “Drinkin’ Guinness in the 416” (416 is the telephone area code for Toronto) asked in a comment about the traffic we were getting so I thought it would be interesting to look at all the traffic for that day and see where it all came from.
Traffic breakdown for May 6
Total visits = 2661 This is much higher than our normal daily average of about 900.
Where did all the visitors come from?
- The Globe and Mail – 1054
- Search engines such as Google – 497
- Stumble (social networking site) – 488
- Three other sites that were mentioned linked to us that day and gave us 280 visits – The sites were Canadian Capitalist (129), Dividend Guy (76) and Million Dollar Journey (75).
- Other sources (blogs, direct etc) – 342
In the three days after May 6, we have gotten another 870 visits from the Globe and Mail which is a lot less than the initial day but still pretty good.
So there you have it – if you want some quality traffic all you have to do is get linked by the Globe and Mail!
Weight
The weight was 180.5 pounds. Diet hasn’t been great but I’m going to try to work harder on this. One of my problems has been too much junk food around the house which is hard to resist after a while.
8 replies on “Globe and Mail Stats Breakdown (and weigh-in)”
Thanks for the mention Mike. Have a nice weekend.
Thanks a bunch for the link Mike!
Congrats on getting mentioned by Reportonbusiness… that’s pretty good credibility and traffic.
Thanks Monty – we’re very happy to get mentioned by the Globe.
That’s a lot of visitors via the globe, richly deserved of course. I hope they stick around. Was the url in the print edition? I meant to look but newspapers disappear into the gents’ washroom quite early in my office (damn construction industry).
Oh and thanks for continuing to send zillions of people to my little site, but neither you nor my mother’s ALL CAPS EMAIL RESPONSES to my posts seem to persuade me to update it regularly 🙂
Great insight into referal traffic. I had one of my posts referenced by US news and it ended up increasing my traffice by 300%. Also had a brief spike with stumble upon one day. It would be intereseting to see if you subscriber count also went up.
Guinness – I believe the print edition had the url as well – that might explain the high number of direct visitors. As far as updating your blog, it sounds like you work a lot of hours which makes it hard.
AndyS – tough to say about RSS since it jumps up and down so much (due to reporting issues rather than people subscribing and unsubscribing) but it appears that the RSS is up about 90 readers from when the contest started, which is about a 15% increase.
[…] 1 year people nationally will seek it out. This corresponds with his experience. Mike and I were referenced in the Globe and Mail after writing our blog for about a […]