My 2008 traffic stats

I published traffic stats for my blog for 2006 and 2007, so it’s time for the 2008 statistics.

2008 Traffic stats

The rough summary is:
2006: 1.7M visits and 2.9M pageviews
2007: 2.3M visits and 4.8M pageviews, plus 31K RSS readers
2008: 3.4M visits and 5.7M pageviews, plus 46K RSS readers, 7986 followers on my Twitter stream, and 1607 subscribers on FriendFeed.

My most popular posts had nothing to do with search engine optimization (SEO). The top traffic-driving posts of 2008 were:
– My Gmail power tips post.
– My “Best Business Card Ever” post.
– The series of blog posts about Chrome that I did in September 2008.
– My two posts about my Halloween costume and Google’s anti-zombie robots.txt on Halloween.

In addition, my how to hack an iphone article was posted in Sept. 2007 but continued to drive especially strong traffic. If visitors were all I wanted, I’d write about nothing but the iPhone. πŸ™‚

Almost as interesting were my traffic sources:

2008 Traffic sources

Google and direct visits were a large fraction of my traffic, but so were sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Image Search, Techmeme, delicious, and Twitter. It’s a good reminder that social media sites and places like image search can drive quite a bit of traffic.

All of this data is courtesy of FeedBurner and Google Analytics, which make this sort of analysis quite easy. What do your 2008 traffic stats look like?

34 Responses to My 2008 traffic stats (Leave a comment)

  1. Matt – Definitely some unexpected stuff here. Prediction? Friendfeed stats will rocket next year. As far as Google … EVERY site I have anything to do with currently showing Google Organic in literal runaway No. 1 (but I guess you knew that πŸ™‚ Great holiday to all at the Plex!

  2. Hey Matt,

    Any stats of traffic to your blog from Denmark, Sweden and Norway?

    PS. Changed my subscription email.

  3. Wow – that’s quite a bit of activity from Google Images!? I’m not surprised, but it’s just more than I would have expected. Exactly what kind of pictures are people seeing Matt? hehehehe

    Have a great holiday season πŸ™‚

    Ryan

  4. Morris Rosenthal

    Matt,

    I just noticed that we get about the same number of visitors from Google:-) So I took a look at a few of the public traffic estimators to see if they would calibrate. Not even close.

    Quantcast puts you at 20.6K a month and me at 148K a month
    Alexa puts your traffic rank at 91,257 and mine at 73,266
    Google Trends puts your daily traffic around 15K and mine around 4K
    Website Outlook puts your site 9,768/day and mine at 17,413/day

    Quantcast has you low, me ballpark, Alexa doesn’t agree with Quantcast, Trends may be the most accurate, though they have me low, and Website Outlook has me way high.

    I guess we’ll have to stick with Analytics.

    Morris

  5. Now that is a whole lot of traffic from Google! I’m so jealous.

  6. Quite impressive, Matt! I tried the blogging thing and all I ever got up to was a little over 200 views per month. (How’s that for a laugh?) Needless to say, I got tired of “talking” to myself and moved on to other writing venues. πŸ™‚

  7. Congrats Matt! Just goes to show that quality content has a way of finding readers.

  8. I just noticed that you have a new Favicon (perhaps it has been there a while since I usually read your posts via RSS).

    I think it is funny that your favicon has more style than your default WordPress template.

  9. Dave Dugdale, my WordPress theme is pretty ancient, but I figure most people read me via RSS/Google Reader, so it probably doesn’t matter. πŸ™‚

  10. Monetize Your Traffic:
    https://www.google.com/adsense/

    πŸ˜‰

  11. The problem I have with this whole post is that it doesn’t accurately summarize the quality of traffic that you have.

    Let’s take the whole social media fad…and yes, I’m going to call it a fad because that’s exactly what it is. The traffic from the Diggs, the del.icio.uses, and especially the SpambleUpons of the world is at best temporal traffic and generally does not convert well to what one would consider to be an “active user” of a site. I’m not sure if that’s true in your particular case, Matt, but your site presents certain anomalies that don’t necessarily exist in other places (e.g. that your target audience would have a lot of the same target audience that the social media sites have).

    The more accurate question is “where did the active users and subscribers come from”? Of course, that would require a bit trickier analysis on your part, but it could be done.

  12. Dave (originial)

    It’s a good reminder that social media sites and places like image search can drive quite a bit of traffic.

    It should also serve as reminder to the professional “SEO experts” (cough) that THINK traffic is traffic. Social Media is junk traffic for ANY site selling anything. That is, *they cost you* more in bandwith etc than they purchase.

    If YOUR SEO is bringing you Social Media traffic, run away…..NOW!

  13. Dave (originial)

    Matt, everytime I ask you this you ignore the question. Hopefully being Xmas you will finally answer it.

    Why don’t you use AdSense and donate your money to a Charity?

    Merry Xmas all πŸ™‚

  14. Yes, it is a good reminder that social media sites can drive traffic on their own. This is good to remember for 2009 when the Goog totally devalues all linkout’s from the social media sites.

    All I can say is, it’s about time.

  15. It seems that you have got many traffic form social media sites as referral. As you are in the top position on Google , you have got more direct traffic and form major search engines. You rock it Matt πŸ™‚
    Happy Xmas and prosperous New Year to you !!!

  16. So why are they coming from google images? is it becuase of all your cat pics?

  17. Awesome stats Matt!! Nothing to wonder about your traffic as you are a special person among SEOs.

    Digg & Stumpleupon is ur top most social media referrals. What abt Sphinn Matt?

  18. Me too got thousands of visitors/day from Digg & Mixx to my blogs. But, still having one doubt on Feedburner.

    * I registered my Blogs RSS feeds in feedburner, but i didn’t received a single visitor or subscribers from there.

    After seen your traffic details I came to know that I need even more knowledge about Feedburner.

    Thanks sharing your traffic details and your referral links πŸ™‚

  19. On my personal blog I have 96,184 views so far this year most popular post was one I did on daniela cicarelli trying to have YouTube blocked in brazil (which i did back in 2007 as a bet with my boss to see if I get some traffic ) could get traffic by writing about . And a post I did about a magic the gathering lolcat.

    Interestingly getting a link from the front page of vallywag earlier in the year gave me my best day ever just under 500

    BTW if anyone likes to play board games at Christmas I can recommend the Battlestar Galtica game from FFG Games

  20. I am amazing to see the 1502319 visitors from google organic, so what is the main keyword to find your blog – “blog”?

  21. Dave (originial)

    My money is on “Matt Cutts” being the #1 organic search term from Google.

    Image search often brings in traffic, but for all the wrong reasons. That is, the searcher is looking to use (even hotlink) an image.

    At one-point this Year my bandwidth increased by 1GB and all on images. I used some .htaccess code to replace images being hotlinked to this one http://www.simplyangel.com/godblessamericaagain1.htm 1 week later image bandwidth dropped πŸ™‚

  22. a little bit offtopic:
    Matt i wish you Merry Christmas, i wish santa will come here..
    /Cristian

  23. Hey Matt, How do you like your new Google Phone? Is it better than the iPhone?

    A 180 dollar cell phone in stead of a bonus of at least 4 digits…. I guess that that applies just for the lower levels in the hiarchy, that don’t have special bonus clauses in their contracts.

  24. @Deb: Obviously the most used keyword will be “Mattcutts”

    Long tail keywords will be “google software engineer, Google Mattcutts, SEO Mattcutts”

    Also he is ranking in first page for the keyword “SEO Blog”

  25. My ratio of Google / Yahoo / Live organic is pretty similar, however am severely (as you might imagine) trailing in a lot of the social following / linking which my content is not as engaging from that perspective.

  26. Since you do have amazing traffic – I don’t know rules on Google Ads for employees but what would be cool is to put 2/3 Google ads on your pages and donate the money to charity (or keep it). Like I said I’m sure you can make good money with ads with that type of traffic – not many click throughs though. Most of your traffic is probably techies like me.

    Keep up the good work.

  27. Hi Matt, I happened to glance at my SEO Quake Toolbar while I was on your homepage.
    It appears that Yahoo and MSN will index a peanut if they could, Google says you have 1,140 pages indexed. Yahoo has 26,400 pages indexed and MSN has a whopping 60,500. Talk about a discrepancy?
    WTG for your 295,892 back-links! (According To Yahoo).

    I’d love to see you do a blog post about “Google bowling” if you could some day. I think someone tried doing that to me a couple of weeks ago. I saw the links show up on my webmaster tools account but luckily whoever it was got their hosting suspended.
    Basically, I think many of us our curious if that could harm us because we’re told by Google themselves that we have no control over who links to us.

    Thanks!

  28. How I wish I could have the same traffic a year from now.. πŸ™‚

  29. “My most popular posts had nothing to do with search engine optimization (SEO).” – that’s mean that some #1 results in google for your blog are wrong isnt it? πŸ™‚

  30. Those are some impressive numbers, Matt. Could you give us top 10 search keywords from google? πŸ˜›

  31. Matt great to see your traffic sources. How much happy it would be if i get a link with a short note and do follow rel πŸ˜‰ from your blog

    Also i expected FeedBurner stat report too πŸ™‚

  32. Dear MATT,

    I am SICK from BLOG SPAM. I see 10 websites each day which rank 1st for VERY competitive KW, ONLY because the use 1000’s of blogs which link to them, they build blog after blog, fill it with random text, put in the text and around the blog links to their site and BOOM they are 1st place in google!!!! Email me for examples! I am SICK of this!!! Send email if you want an example.

  33. I know that this is probably not the thread to be posting this question, but I cannot seem to find a place on your blog where you discuss Blogger. Any chance the Blogger team is going to do anything about their lack of SEO options?

    I see that you are on a WP platform…isn’t it time Blogger offered a cool all in one SEO tool or just anything that helps us hopeless Blogger loyalists out there? I have even tried to do some manual changes…but alas, I am not winning the good fight.

  34. I feel you passion Mike, the sites with no real content suck horribly. The sites with content will eventually rise to the top, I hope. The search engines must take into account 1sec visits and balance that in some way against the site rankings.

    I had no idea Digg could have such an impact.

    Will

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