I used to track visits and hits on the old blog. I actually posted some of the statistics once upon a time. Needless to say, THIS blog has out-performed the older blog and we have the results to prove it.
This new NVL Blog was created in late December of 2009. It didn't receive much traffic until the word got out that this was the place to talk local high school football.
To clarify, before you read the stats:
Visits are sessions -- basically, every time someone enters the URL for the blog and the website is displayed. A visit is usually tracked for 20-30 minutes, on average.
Page views are tracked every time a user visits a page on this website. Entering the website, clicking on the comments link, and clicking on any of the tabs near the header will count as page views.
Unique visitor: This counts user to our website only once. The simplest way to explain this is by using the following example. User X visits the blog. This counts as a new unique visitor to the website. User X then visits the blog a week later. This is User X's second visit to the blog, but is identified as just ONE (the same) unique visitor. Therefore, if I visit the blog 100 times a month from home computer, this counts as just ONE unique visitor. Pretty good stat.
From December 2009 through July 2010, the blog received, on average, 100 visits per day.
Once things began to pick up and teams began to practice in August 2010, traffic began to soar. This is when the blog hit its peak. The following are statistics from August 2010 through the end of December 2010.
Aug. 2010 - Dec. 2010
68,978 visits
11,319 unique visitors
148,395 page views
Average time on site: 4 min 40 secs
Things began to simmer down after the state title games in December. Since the end of the 2010 season, we've averaged roughly 100 visits per day through today with 9,859 visits and 1,890 unique visitors.
What is great about this site is that 25% of our traffic comes directly. Meaning people either know the URL or bookmark the website and visit it. 35% of our traffic comes through Google searches for "nvl blog." And another 9% comes via Bing search engine queries. That's close to 70%, which means we don't need to advertise to lure-in visitors.
And finally, here are the total stats from day one:
Total stats (Dec. 2009 through current):
96,629 visits
193,975 page views
14,718 unique visitors
Average time on site: 3 min 58 secs
I am sure the blog will receive a more significant amount of traffic during the 2011 season. These stats prove that not only do our regulars read and post here, but players, parents, and coaches read what we post. As we know, some are more sensitive than others, so think twice about what you're going to post before you hit submit.
Cheers.
