Analytics data - 6 months in (Thank you, XF)

[Coop1979]

I love Google Analytics. Love the graphs, love the data, love everything about it. Recently I celebrated 6 months since migrating my site from vB to XF. I was expecting a decent jump in traffic due to our servers being less stressed, page speed improvements, and all-around improved visitor experience that came with the new software experience.

I was shocked when I saw that my traffic increased an astonishing 89% year-over-year.

+89.58%!

Page views are up 23%, though Pages/Visit are actually down 25% (I think it's due to lack of a "Similar Thread" box at the bottom of each thread). Bounce rate is also up (again, I attribute this to the lack of an easy avenue to related content), but SEO has increased new visitors by 18%.

I've previously thanked XenForo for the amazing things it's done for my site on the hardware side of the world, but I wanted to thank XF again for the amazing things it's doing on the content side of my site.

Thanks, XenForo.

 

[digitalpoint]

I really doubt 25% of all page views originate from people clicking on the similar threads" box at the bottom. You'd be lucky if it was 0.1%.

That being said, you probably see less page views because AJAX requests don't count as page views, and quite a bit of XF is AJAX based.

 

[DBA]

Like DP said the less page/visit is most likely due to XF being so much more user friendly/efficient. For example VB reloads the page after every reply while XF simply adds your reply via Ajax, so every reply would be one less page view.

 

[Coop1979]

Good point, DP. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[craigiri]

I have a steep drop in page views and in time spent, but an increase in visits and visitors and new visitors. The drops are due to, as DP said, the different way XF processes data. Also, when your search - and googles too - are faster and better, that means folks are likely to find their answers with fewer page views.

In that sense, lower page views and less time spent are good things, IMHO.

I have some charts to share (soon), but I think the summary is that XF definitely did us no harm and is probably doing us a decent amount of good. Since we have MANY years of data on our analytics, I have reasonable faith in the measurements.

In general I don't think there is any magic in most of this web software. "Do no harm" is probably the most important point. After that, it's speed, ease of use, etc.

Edit - here is the chart. I usually don't share the reductions in page views because that confuses those who look at the surface. However, my adsense revenues are the same or up, which indicates no loss of page value in total.