Website Trends: The Increasing Popularity of Valleyfreeradio.org
The following is a report on the increasing popularity of this Website, based on data gathered over the last two months (July and August). In brief, the site as a place for disseminating information, and its streaming audio, is rapidly increasing its audience.Information about our RSS and podcast feeds is based on a little more than three weeks worth of data; otherwise, I think two months of data gives us a good indication of what is popular on the site and what needs improvement.
I am using three different services to collect data on how people use the VFR site: Google Analytics, Google Sitemaps, and Feedburner. Each service tracks a different aspect of the user experience. Google Analytics is the most comprehensive tool, tracking not only user behavior (what pages are most popular, how long people stay on the site, page views, and unique visitors, for example), but also what tools people use to view the VFR site (operating system, browser, and connection speed, for example). Sitemaps is useful in tracking how VFR appears in search rankings on Google based on unique search terms, and Feedburner tracks the number of subscribers to our feeds, among other feed related statistics.
I began developing the site with Sarah Shaffner in March 2006 and we went live in May to coincide with the fund drive. At that time this site began using Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps does a few interesting things; among others, it helps Google archive our site, which in turn lets us see what search terms people are using when the VFR site appears in their search results, along with the “average position” in those results. Average position means where (first on the page, second, etc.) VFR appears in an average search for a specific term, and the average over the last three weeks. Because the folks at Google pride themselves on being pretty smart, the same search term may result in a different position depending on many different factors: for example, what country you are in, did you search for this same thing before, did you click on that link before, is the site becoming more popular, etc.. Here I am including the search terms that make the VFR site appear highest in an average Google search result.
I have broken down our statistics from Google Analytics into two categories: comparison statistics and user profile statistics; with the comparison statistics I compared the months July and August, while the user profile stats data is aggregated to draw a profile of site visitors.
During July and August the VFR site received visits from users in more than 75 countries, with the United States being the most highly represented. The table at left lists the ten countries that most often visited the VFR site, with one entry being “not set,” meaning that Google could not determine where that visit was originating. Obviously there are many other countries that fall below this table; around 70 different countries had between nine and one visit over the two months. 
Google can also track the referring source of our traffic, meaning, where people were when they decided to click on a VFR link or type the URL into their browsers. Not surprisingly, Google is our number one referrer. However, take note that sparetherock.com is a top referrer (consistently), and though it didn’t make the top ten, Midweek Politics Radio with its new entry into the VFR podcast, is coming on strong.
One of the things Web designers pay attention to is the technology visitors are using to experience a site. Based on what technology people use, various design choices are made. Also, from what we know about our visitors, we can better understand how our streaming signal is working (or not). This surprised me: only six percent of visitors are using a dial-up connection. After collecting data for a few more months to confirm this trend, I think we can make some decisions about design choices are our streaming signal. 
Also surprising were the number of people not using some version of Internet Explorer. On Websites with a mostly Web designer audience this is quite common, but on a more general audience site I think this is unusual (though I like it!).
Comparing the months of July and August (in the summer climates, these tend to be lower Internet usage months), we see that the VFR site is increasing in popularity, both in terms of new visitors, unique views (page views to a page, counting each person once), and page views (total views to a page, including multiple views of a page by the same person). In July the site received 1,614 unique visitors, for an average of 52 visits per day; in August the number of visits increased to 2,651, with an average of 86 per day.
As I mentioned above, what we know about our RSS and podcast feeds is based on limited data; also, subscriber numbers I have seen for feeds on other Websites leads me to believe that these numbers fluctuate a great deal. For example, the number of subscribers always decreases during weekends (who knows why). During August VFR averaged 10 subscribers for its podcast (with a low of 5 people and a high of 21). The RSS feed had an average of eight subscribers, a low of three, and a high of 17 subscribers. I am predicting that as we expand our selection of VFR shows to our podcast the subscriber numbers will increase.
There are some brief observations I would like to make about both the data presented above and the more detailed data I have collected. It is clear that programs with their own Websites that appropriately promote their association with VFR are driving a significant amount of traffic to the VFR site; but, the opposite is also true: the VFR site is also driving traffic to these popular sites. The stronger the relationship between these Websites, the more each benefits. Moreover, Google search rankings increase for both sites as they drive traffic towards each other.
Looking at the data, it is clear people are not even looking at the donation page. An effort needs to be made to better leverage the traffic the site is getting. We should at least entice people to look at the page and consider a donation.
Looking at our signal streams, based on limited data, it seems as though most people are using either the highest quality stream (ogg) or the mp3 stream; the highest quality ogg stream gets 56% of the traffic, while the mp3 stream gets 25%. The mid and low quality ogg streams combined receive 19% of the clicks. One thing that I can not track with Google is how long people are listening to our streams. I don’t believe the data is reliable because once they close the browser window (while continuing to listen), Google thinks they are no longer connected.
Finally, I want to close with the note that I am not promising to produce these reports every month, or even with regular frequency. It took a few hours to gather the data, analyze it, create the graphics, and then write this report. In the future I will give much briefer updates about Website trends when something interesting pops-up, but I can’t spend all my time creating reports when a lot of work still needs to be done on the site.
Tags: 103.3-radio, Committees, Committees, Latest Station News, Latest Station News, Podcast, rss_feeds, Web, Web
