Now 2015 is out of the way and that particular year is complete, I can now carry out my annual picking apart of the important stats on this website to see how it performed during this year, and how is fared with the 12 months previous.
To kick things off, here’s a nice simple infographic to compare 2015’s vitals to 2014’s:
I’m happy to report that on the visitor front, DGB did really well, with an increase of just under 30,000 on the year. I never really set any hard and fast targets, just to beat the previous year’s total, which was a box checked on this front.
The same goes for the unique visitor count, with a rise of just over 14,000 extra unique visitors visiting DGB. This for some is the most important stat of all, as it demonstrates a site’s power to pull in a maximum number of different people, not just the same ones over and over again.
The only fly in the ointment in 2015 was the drop in page views compared to 2014. This has only happened once before in the near 7 years the site has been going. If I was to try and give a reason for the gap, it would be traced back to 2014. Half way through that year I carried out a massive revamp of the site, which went live in May. After that, page views jumped massively as people got used to the layout of the site and completely different navigation. This meant for the following few months after the revamp, the page view figures got a big boost. It meant it was going to be a very tough task in 2015 to beat 2014’s page view total as people had now got used to the new DGB.
Still, near 200k page views for a personal blog, a few ads and a bit of sponsored content all about windows ain’t bad.
2016…
As I’ve mentioned, I never really set any hard targets, just as long the following year’s figures beats the previous year. So I guess as long as 2016 gets better figures than 2015 I’ll be happy.
However, there are some milestones I wouldn’t mind knocking off this year. For a start, I’m edging closer to 150,000 visitors in a single year. I would like to reach that target by the end of the year. It’s possible. 2016 has started really strongly on the visitor front, with the current daily average working out at 163,703 visits for 2016 if traffic can stay at this early level.
I would also like to knock off the 250k page view mark this year. I was a little deflated that I couldn’t do it in 2015. But I have lots of new plans and ideas to try throughout the year which will hopefully get me to where I want the site to be. A few of these new features will appear on here soon!
Overall, 2015 was another great year for DGB. Growth in many areas, bounce rates dropped again, average time spent on the site went up as well. I will continue throughout this year to ensure that DGB continues to grow and maintains it’s place as one of the premium industry media websites – updated daily!
