General

Thanks for the Hits! May 2008 Traffic and Referral Numbers

Guess what. May 2008 was a record month. Other than March 2007 when I hit over 40,000 hits, this past May was my best month ever. In fact, I had more page views than even last March!

March 2007:
Hits: 42564
Views: 54784

May 2008:
Hits: 30616
Views: 55704

So even though I have 12,000 visitors less than my record month, each visitor is looking at more pages.

Subscribers

Along with the roughly 800-1200 visitors I get per day, I also have people reading through their RSS readers and email. Last month, I had about 1600 subscribers, but on May 16th, I peaked at 1811 subscribers. On most days (non-weekends), I average over 1700 readers, and I thank every one of you!

Google Pagerank

In early May, my PR went from 4 to 5, but just a week later, it dropped to a 3. I’m not sure if it’s because I have a few text link ads on this site or because I threw up a new theme design that same week.

Honestly, though, only a few advertisers care about PR anymore because it’s almost meaningless, but just the fact that some advertisers still rely on the number and try to lowball me on rates is annoying. I mean c’mon, $120 for a year-long text link ad in a prime spot? Those ads are probably what got me spanked in the first place and you want me to put one up for $10 a month? I think not.

Top Keyword Searches

The searches that bring people to my site haven’t really changed since last month. However, “Millionaire by Thirty” was added, while “Clothing Donation Value” (or variations thereof) have dropped from the list since tax time is over:

1. Free Laptop Nation
2. Free Laptop
3. Clever Dude
4. Car Fax or “Free Carfax Report” (although I’ve never written about one)
5. Millionaire by Thirty (actually, the giveaway article is just above the review article in the results)
6. Technical Service Bulletins (or TSBs)

Traffic Sources

At a high level:

Search Engines: 35.47%

Referring Sites: 50.18%

Direct Traffic: 14.33%

Search engine traffic dropped back down to normal (in the 30% range) from last month’s 56%, mainly due to a good deal of traffic from MSN Smart Spending.

Top Personal Finance Blog Referrers

So which Personal Finance site sent the most traffic my way in May? How did they compare to last month’s rankings? Well, you’ll see last month’s rank after the new rank in (). If they weren’t ranked last month, you’ll see a (-).

1. (2) My Money Blog
2. (1) Five Cent Nickel
3. (6) Frugal Dad
4. (-) Cheap Healthy Good
5. (-) Mighty Bargain Hunter
6. (3) Single Ma’s Fabulous Financials
7. (-) Moolanomy
8. (9) I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…
9. (-) Free Money Finance
10. (4) The Simple Dollar

How many hits does it take to be the top personal finance blog referrer? 1,698. How about number 2? Well that one’s a littler easier at just 381. I included this because Nickel (who was #1 last month) asked 🙂

Top Non-PF Blog Referrers

Last month, the first PF blog referrer popped in at #10 on the overall list. This month, 3 PF blogs are in the top 10 (uh, that would be #1-3 above). Here are the non-PF blog referrers for May. For the first few sites, their total traffic is in parentheses:

1. Google Search (31%)
2. MSN Smart Spending (18%)
3. Direct Traffic (14%)
4. Google Reader and Homepage (4%)
   
5. Yahoo! Search
6. Yahoo! Personal Finance (aka US News)
7. StumbleUpon
8. MSN Search
9. Lifehacker
10. AOL Search

Again, thanks to all my readers, fellow bloggers, commenters and scrapers for making this site such a success!