2010 Review of australianwebmaster.com
// February 8th, 2011 // australianwebmaster.com
A web site is a bit like a child who’s growing up – looking at them every day you don’t really notice the changes however when you compare a photo taken 12 months apart the changes are clear.
I recently sat down to look at the statistics of australianwebmaster.com. Thanks to Google Analytics it’s quite easy to compare the site over the 12 months and analyse where the improvements have been and try to see where the site is heading.
Lately I’ve noticed a high number of members logging in each day and quite a lot of activity. As a forum owner this is what you want to see and although I wasn’t spending as much time on the site as I normally do I felt that the site must be working well.
Going through the statistics has given me a different perspective. I’m certainly glad I went through the exercise because it has made something very clear to me and changed my entire way of thinking about the site.
Firstly the good news – all the statistics were positive, meaning that everything had improved:
Visits – +26.59%
Unique vistors – +38.52%
Pageviews – +33.02%
Compared to previous years this growth is quite poor however as long as there is growth I’m satisfied – I would have liked to see bigger growth however 2010 was probably the least active I had been on the site so it probably reflects that.
Now the bad news was the country of origin for my visitors. Compared to 2009, my Australian visitors had declined by 15.5% but vistors from India had more than doubled. Australia was still the highest, but only just (less than 1%).
If the forum was a global site then this isn’t an issue, however as the site is AUSTRALIANwebmaster.com this was an issue and I had to do something. So I had to decide what was important to the site – high activity but with low quality costs, or lower activity with higher quality posts.
I will detail what I’ve done in another post.
For the record, at the moment the forum stats are:
Threads: 4,780, Posts: 30,488, Members: 8,628
