Calculating visitors

In my last post I talked about the increase of subscribers to my feed. From Google Analytics I get the total number of visitors to the site. So the question is how to combine these two metrics to produce the real picture of growth. The flaw with the total number of visitors is that a big proportion bounce back as soon as they realize that they landed in the wrong place. This porportion can be captured easily by discarding all visits that last less than 10 seconds. They are on the opposite side of the scale to those that have subscribed to the feed. In between these two extremes we'll find all other meaningful visits that lasted enough to merit some attention or were done by returning visitors.



In this graph I've accumulated data from the first 9 months of the blog, using the three groups I discuss above:

• Feed Subscribers: these are visitors that will keep coming back for more. Since the number varies day to day, I take the maximum number for each month. This accounts for the fact that not all subscribers read their feeds every day, but when they all do, you get the best snapshot of their size.


• Returning Visitors: these are only those visits by visitors who had been to the blog before. They are important to me because they are likely interested in the content. While nothing can guarantee that they will come back, the fact that they were able to come back once indicates that they are capable of coming back again. They are for now the largest group in this breakdown.


• Other Readers: Those users that have just discovered the blog (first visit), but spent over 10 seconds are my final group. While they may not come back again, the fact that they invested time suggests that there is interest. While this is not an absolute rule, notice how this group provides a general idea of how much the other two groups will grow next month. Therefore they represent the potential for growth.

This is far from a precise method, but it is much better than settling for the total number of page views or visitors in a given month. If I was just looking at visitors to the blog, I would assume that there was no growth in February, when in fact it was an important month.