Quality Visits vs. Quantity

This post is my 200th post, so I thought I would focus on traffic for my blog.  Since I moved my blog to my own server using WordPress, I've noticed that I don't have nearly as much traffic as I did with Blogger.  At first I thought that it may be a simple case of people not following my link to the new site, or people just not interested in my posts.  Both is quite likely.  

So, I thought I would check out my Google Analytics for both sites and compare the data, just to see what I may be doing wrong in regards to my WordPress site vs. the original Blogger site.  The numbers are really interesting: 

 

	WordPress Results	Blogger Results
Visits	208	2,050
Page Views	306	2,313
Pages Per Visit	1.47	1.13
Bounce Rate	72.60%	91.02%
Average Time On Site	00:03:08	00:00:28
New Visits	52.40%	94.39%

 
As you can see, the numbers are quite different, equaling out in weight.  While the Blogger site still gets more hits over the period of a year, the WordPress site keeps visitors longer, provides a higher likelihood of additional page views, and has a lower bounce rate.  

For me, while I may have lost a lot of visitors, I have gained readership.  How?  By keeping more people on the site and reading my posts.  For me, that is far more valuable and flattering than thousands of people visiting over a month, but no one reading anything I post.  It's actually pretty exciting!  Now I wonder how the readership will evolve over time.  Will I gain more readers while keeping the bounce rate the same?  Perhaps I will increase the average time on the site with more interesting content.  

I'm glad I moved from Blogger, if for nothing else than having a control specimen to compare my new site against.  Now I can more objectively determine how well my blog is doing, and in what areas.