The effect of CSS galleries on website traffic
It has now been about a week, 7 days since this website got picked up by CSS Mania among other CSS galleries and I thought I’d share with you what affect getting listed on CSS galleries had on my website traffic, feed subscribers and bandwidth used.
Google Analytics web traffic for scottmallinson.com
The most noticable change was easily identified in Google Analytics. The web traffic peaked at it’s highest level on the day that scottmallinson.com was listed on the CSS galleries. As the image to the left illustrates, getting listed on the CSS gallery websites caused a instant and dramatic increase in web traffic to this website, though it has tailed off somewhat since.
Whilst the web traffic has tailed off from it’s peak of 657 visits, it still remains higher than what it was at before getting listed on the CSS galleries. Initially this was due to people still accessing the CSS galleries and linking through to this website, however now it seems that the return traffic is organic.
FeedBurner feed statistics for scottmallinson.com
As well as affecting the web traffic, the listing affected the feed subscriber numbers though to a lesser extent as the image to the right illustrates.
The overall increase in feed subscribers has only been slight; roughly 2 or 3 new subscribers than before appearing on the CSS galleries. It still falls for short of the 23 regular feed subscribers obtained when the blogging frequency on this website was more frequent (up until a month before the launch of the redesign).
The bandwidth consumed serving out this website to all you visitors has also increased, as you would expect, and currently uses roughly 42Mb per day which is estimated to be around 1.2Gb per month. Whilst I don’t have any accurate figures to compare the increase in bandwidth consumption against, I would expect the usage to be directly proportional to the increase in web traffic.
So in conclusion, getting listed on CSS galleries is a good thing if you are wanting to increase awareness of your website and attract more subscribers to your feed. It is worth noting however that the amount of traffic received from CSS gallery listings will depend on the quality of the thumbnail taken of your website, and also whether the CSS gallery visitors like your design.
Popularity: 7% [?]
3 comments to “The effect of CSS galleries on website traffic”
Nice article
Iso Ka at 8.04 am
on Wednesday 22nd October 2008
Interesting stats. That’s pretty much the same as what I’ve noticed in my stats.
It’s interesting the physical placement of your site’s thumbnail on the page has an impact on the number of visitors to your site.
I was recently on BestWebGallery and was the very 1st site on the 1st page. Like you, I got around 600 – 700 uniques per day. Yet when a few more sites were added and I was toward the middle of the page (still on the front page), my visitors dropped about 200.
I also noticed a similar trend on my feeds as well.
Thanks for sharing your stats.
Shawn at 3.58 am
on Saturday 1st November 2008
[...] your design kicks some serious ass you can get a nice boost of traffic from submitting your app to some of the countless CSS [...]
smeesh - covering startups and that stuff » 9 Quick Tips For Marketing Your Web App. at 4.49 pm
on Monday 9th March 2009