It’s been a little while since DGB 4.0 has gone live, so I thought now would be a good time to reflect on the impact it has had and to see if the changes I made have been worth it.
The feedback from you has been fantastic. So many of you have commented to say that the look of the site, and how it navigates is far better than previous versions. Indeed, I am much happier with they way it looks. A fully responsive site which displays so much more content than previous versions could hold. It’s also packed full of features that will allow me to tweak and change the look of the site in the future. I’m hoping this means no more drastic site changes in the future. You never know, this might be the last incarnation of DGB for a long time!
For those who follow this site, you’ll also know that I love a good stat attack, so this post is now different. I have created an infographic which displays the stats of the site in the months of April and June. As the revamp happened in May, I thought it would be easier to use two full calendar months to demonstrate 5 major site measurements since the new version went live:
[xyz-ihs snippet=”DGB4Stats”]
For me, the standout stats are the increased page views, the enormous reduction in bounce rates and the number of pages viewed per visit. But first let me tackle a question some of you may be asking; why are visits and unique visitors down in June from April? Well, two reasons. Firstly, I picked a rather bad time to start doing a revamp. As the year starts to gather pace, it is not always wise to slam the breaks on a growing website. However, my impatience for change got the better of me and I went ahead and did it anyway. But the second and most important reason is that DGB has always had a slump in the lead up to summer. It always has. In the five years I have had this site, visits and unique visitor numbers have ALWAYS tailed off around May/June time. I’m not quite sure why, I would love to know myself. However, I had expected this blip as it is as regular as the sun sets every day. What I can say though is that although down on April, June’s visits and unique visitor numbers are still higher than the same period last year, which importantly means growth. I can also confirm that July has seen a busier traffic rate. At present averages, DGB is due to pass the 100,000 visits in a year barrier for the first time – a major milestone for me and something I sincerely wish to achieve.
So, to other matters. I am very happy that the bounce rate has dropped by such a wide margin. Bounce rates measure how many people land on your site, then immediately leave it. A high bounce rate can indicate that lots of people are finding a website probably by accident and then click off it. Despite a fairly high bounce rate last year, DGB still performed well. So to have reduced the average bounce rate to just 5% is a massive boost for the site.
Then there are the page views. A boost of 8000+ extra page views in June compared to April. For me, I put this down to the new site and the way it promotes far more content than previous versions. The month of June saw DGB achieve it’s best ever page view results, and July looks set to better that still. Right now, it looks as though the site is going to pass the 250,000 page view barrier in 2014, again another major milestone for a site that started off as a small, amateur angry industry column.
Why Do Stats Matter?
Some may wonder why stats mean so much to me. Well, to me, stats are a great way to validate the work someone puts into a website. Stats are a resource which proves whether your strategy, business model, content and promotion are working for you or not. Analysing that data helps you discover areas that are working for you and areas that are not, allowing you to improve on those areas that could be doing better.
We all do it. Stats are everywhere and we’re all analysing them at some point during the day. It could be sales figures, conversion rates, leads, remedial calls, recycling targets etc. They are important, no matter how boring you may find them.
For me, putting together these infographics and delving a little deeper into the mechanics of the site demonstrates to me that DGB is a site that continues to grow at a fantastic rate. It has been transformed in five short years into something much bigger and much more fun than I ever thought it would. And I don’t plan to stop it here.
As you may have seen on the landing page, I still intend to launch a consumer section that will eventually grow into a huge resource that will hopefully aid homeowners looking for new home improvements in some way. I’m now aiming at a much bigger proportion of traffic, building on top of good industry based traffic.
Right, no more stats posts for a while, I promise!