Is 4,000 uniques a month too small?

[Cookie Dough]

Hi everyone,

I am a new member to the forum and have been reading a lot of back posts. You all contribute so well here.

I am hoping for opinions on my current web situation.

My website
A semi-personal blog where I write about hair, fashion & my general thoughts about life. I've only recently started taking it seriously a few months ago. I have a few loyal readers who comment all the time and several lurkers who subscribe but comment here and there.

The numbers (please don't laugh lol - it's not a lot)

28 subscribers (RSS & Email)
4,200 unique visitors a month
22,000 visits
28,000 page views

My question

I would like to know what the correlation between the 28K page views and the 4,200 unique visitors means? Does this mean that most of the unique visitors are repeat visitors or just that they have viewed a lot of pages in one go?

Also, is 4,200 uniques a month for a personal blog bad/good/could be improved?

Any thoughts would be helpful.

Cheers.

[mack]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

You have said you have only just started taking it seriously, so from that point of view I would say your traffic figures are actually very good. Regarding the information you provided about stats...

A visit is any session on your website. If you come here and view a couple of pages thats one visit. When we talk about unique visits if you come to this site and every day view a few pages thats only one unique visit.

Page views are the total number of pages requested. This doesn't take anything else into account, just the total pages viewed.

As an example if you come here once every day for a week and view 10 pages on each visit...

Thats 10 visits, one unique visit and 70 page views.

Hope this helps.

Mack.

[Cookie Dough]

Thank you very much for explaining that, mack. It's all so new to me at the minute.

Is it better to have lots of unique visits or more pageviews? Which one is seen as more important

Cheers.

[mack]

I think its good to try and increase your unique visits. If you can do this the rest will naturally follow.

Mack.

[edited by: mack at 2:24 am (utc) on Mar 27, 2010]

[Swanny007]

In the case of a blog, subscribers and unique visitors are the two main numbers to be concerned about. You can never have too many of either ;-)

[tangor]

Also bear in mind that some visits are bots disguised as user agents. Not quite as often these days, we still see prefetch and link scanners as well. Spending a little time with your server logs can provide some very useful information.

[Cookie Dough]

Thank you all so much for your answers.

mack: Presumably should I be doing better SEO to retain unique visitors?

Swanny007: I am trying really hard to get more subs but I find that the number dips up and down with RSS feedreaders, which is a bit annoying. Should I be pushing email subscriptions more?

tangor: Thank you for letting me know about the bots. I need to check that out.

Cheers everyone!

[vivalasvegas]

What you should do is try to increase traffic. In order to do this you'll have to write more articles and market your website (inbound links to your site from other websites). This way your number of unique visitors will increase and, as a result your number of subscriptions will go up.

[rocknbil]

Presumably should I be doing better SEO to retain unique visitors?

"Better SEO" (and marketing, as mentioned) brings more visitors, new and returning.

Compelling content retains visitors, and can increase the average time on site - although compelling content will also bring more traffic as more relevance for particular terms is added over time. It's an exercise in futility if you get tons of traffic and the bounce rate is 99.99% with an average time on site of 3 seconds. :-)

4000 uniques is not all that bad, I have clients that are in competitive markets and are lucky to see 500 - 1000, but most of them aren't doing the work (adding content.)

The nut you might want to crack is why you only have 28 subscribers at 4000 uniques, maybe add something that motivates them to participate in subscription which will likely increase the return visitors.

[Cookie Dough]

Thank you all so much for all your helpful suggestions.

vivalasvegas - do you think inbound links are more important than writing say one article a day?

rocknbill - I really appreciate your insight. I am still trying to figure out the 28 rss subscribers at 4,000 uniques a month.

I was reading that ebooks are a good way to do this, but I tried and the ebook didnt even get any comments, but I got plenty of views from the subscribers I already have when I checked my feedburner statistics.

Lol, the trials of trying to make it online!

[lammert]

Writing one article a day will keep your current visitors returning and will also gradually create more spider food for the search engines. Adding inbound links will create more paths to your site for new visitors and in general helps your rankings in the search engine. So it is not that one is better than the other. Both are needed to create a healthy blog with both a substantial rate of new and returning visitors.

[Cookie Dough]

Thanks for all your comments.

I just wanted to post a short update.

I have taken everything on board, and I have realised that my low subscriber numbers could be to the fact that I write about many things.

So I conducted a small survey on my website using Survey Monkey. Over the space of 2 days, I got 8 responses but so far, I have learned the following facts about my readers:

--75% of them read the blog on the website
--62.5% of them want more posts related to hair (my blog focuses on beauty, hair and fashion)

I think from this, I know I have to write on hair now if I want to keep the readers engaged and get the traffic up.

Thanks you all!