Hi guys last month I released our December stats report and I’m committing to doing this each month. This month there is some data on monetization (or lack thereof) and I delve into some more detail on stats for particular pieces of content.
Highlights
- Monetization is a problem
- Traffic strong (almost 10,000 visits for the month)
- Great results from getting other experts to contribute to my content
Income
I released the paid version of Informly ($9 / month) towards the end of January which very disappointing results. Out of the 500 or so active users (3,000 odd total signups) I only had 3 signups to the paid plan. Ouch.
BTW I’m not complaining and I wasn’t expecting a huge conversion but they are lower than I hoped so I’m currently looking at my options here. I’ve had a better response to the agency plan (see next month’s report) but the conversions on the normal small business plan really aren’t anywhere near high enough.
I’m working on a bunch of things now to try to work out how to best monetize the normal small business users more on this next month.
Website stats
Visits
The news gets better from here thankfully, January was a great month traffic wise.
After having my launch in December I didn’t think there was any hope of keeping up the momentum but January was very close in terms of traffic getting 9,226 total visits.
Not bad considering I was away for the first week!
Here is the monthly trend chart showing the data from when I started.
Traffic sources
Here are the top 20 traffic sources, the notable stats are:
- Google traffic was up 20%. I haven’t analyzed it a lot because they are fairly small numbers but I noticed Neil Patel mention in this post that Google traffic to blogs so perhaps that could explain it.
- Brian from Cas Jam mentioned Informly in a post he wrote that went viral on Hacker News. I wrote about it in detail in ‘4 things I learnt about traffic this week‘.
- Twitter traffic was down quite a bit, I produced less content so perhaps this is the reason (I went nuts with content in December see the content marathon).
- Xero mentioned Informly in a blog post which sent quite a bit of traffic and conversions also.
- My guest post on Softwarebyrob.com on 13 pre launch traffic strategies continues to send a lot of traffic mainly cause Rob hasn’t updated the site since I wrote it!
- Traffic from alternativeto.net also went up close to 50% I guess it’s been a big traffic month for everyone.
- I was also nominated for and won the Telstra small business blogging people’s choice award (see this post). This sent 80 visits in January (the winner wasn’t announced in January).
Here is the top 20
Conversions
Conversions went down considerably but again December being launch month registered a lot of conversions. 620 conversions throughout January was pretty good. This was broken up as follows:
- Signups to Informly 541
- Email opt ins 79
It’s likely that some of the email signups are Informly users and visa versa
Here are the top converting sources
Signup sources
Here are the various sources of new signups. Again email marketing is high (a lot of Informly users signing up for my new Actionable Analytics email course for example) and lots of new users from Xero which was cool.
Blog stats
Total visits to the blog homepage 876 (up 8%)
Top content:
- The beginners guide to podcasting 659 visits – This post was from last year but I emailed a bunch of podcasters to get some updated content for the post and asked them to share it and they did (Chris Brogan among others – more info in 4 things I learnt about traffic this week)
- Small business content strategy infographic – 262 visits I also did a bunch of promotion for this including submitting to infographic directories and to reddit etc.
- Vote for Dan in the blogging awards and get free beer – 249 visits I guess it was the word ‘beer’ in the headline. I also emailed my list with a link to this post and uses a Hello Bar on the site pointing people to it.
- Google Analytics Advanced Segments – 218 visits This post wasn’t new either but I did debut a new blog homepage design that lists our most popular posts with this as one of them so I suspect it got a bit of a boost from this and it continues to get good organic search traffic.
- The Informly starter plan is now available - 205 visits This was the post I pointed people to when we launched the paid plan.
I’ve taken my learnings out of the podcasting guide exercise (where I got input from experts) as well as from my conversation with the content marketing godfather and I am working on some more content like this for February. I’m also going to make more of an effort with my post titles (note the title of this post?).
Podcast stats
It’s definitely been a quieter month with the podcasting after the content marathon but the stats are healthy:
In December I had 6,594 downloads which was a little bit disappointing given the amount of episodes I produced (12 episodes).
In January there were 5,172 across all episodes but there were only 6 new episodes in January (4 episodes of Web Domination and 2 of Agency Talk).
I’d definitely like to improve these stats, I’m getting less downloads than I used to (although I changed from Buzzsprout to Blubrry so perhaps the consistency across platforms in terms of stats isn’t there).
Informly usage stats
Most of the stats below are tracked by Kiss Metrics.
Total signups
The total signups for Informly as at 31 January is 2,942 and 96 free trials of our agency version. Note as mentioned in the December report there are a lot of reasons why this number isn’t an accurate reflection of how many people are using the app (people creating multiple accounts etc).
Active users
The active user metric is a better guess of how many people are using the app and it’s basically a total of how many people logged in during the month. Of course since there were a lot of new users (600 odd) this figure also includes people who just created their account and may not turn into an active user so it’s really not an accurate measure either.
I have recently installed Intercom and it lets me filter out based on how many sessions people have had so next month I will report back on a more reasonable metric on how many active users I have. But 727 is my best guess for now.
Intercom is also enabling me to engage with my users better with automated messages which I’m going to kick off in February so I’m hoping this will bring some inactive users back to the site.
Anything missing?
If there are any other metrics you’d like me to cover here just reply below and I’ll delve into them next month. I will be reporting on the stats around our agency plan next month as well as some testing of different options for monetization.
Content marketers, if you are only using Google Analytics you are doing it wrong!
Google Analytics doesn't tell you everything you need to know to create content that converts and engages your audience. Informly does.
