I'm an analytics junkie. Along with my constant monitoring of email and the blog tracker, I have to admit that I watch referring URLs, unique visitors and Feedburner stats like a hawk. Sometimes I'm on it several times before lunch. This unhealthy obsession has lead to some valuable discoveries over time, including one that I discussed during my sessions in San Jose called "the linkbait bump" and another that everyone who runs a site should be paying attention to - action tracking by referral source.

Action Tracking by Referral Source

In the screen capture above (from our analytics provider - Indextools), you can see a list of domains that sent us traffic over the last few weeks, along with the number of SEOmoz membership signups those referrals led to. We only recently began tracking this information, but already you can see some clear patterns, including:

• Digg, StumbleUpon & Reddit are sending traffic, but fewer than 1/10th of one percent of those visitors sign up for membership (they might be subscribing to the feed, which we don't currently track through Indextools).
• The domains that point primarily to our tools (like SEOCompany & WebRankInfo) are responsible for the highest number of signups, but this is to be expected since you have to register to use Keyword Difficulty in particular.
• SearchEngineWatch, Stuntdubl & SEOBook are amazingly on-topic sources of traffic, which directly bears out in the higher percentages of referrals who become members.

Action tracking is one of the most valuable things you can do on any type of site. Most folks limit its application to e-commerce, but you can see from the data above how valuable it can be, even for a simple blog. Even if you don't have a membership signup, you could attach the action tracking to your "add comment" link in a blog or to a newsletter signup on a content site. Segmenting that data by incoming referrals (search engines, direct type-ins and links) gives you an even better picture of who's sending you truly valuable traffic.

The Linkbait Bump

I first talked about this in my SEM via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging session in San Jose (Barry covered it here). The idea is that after a big piece of linkbait that draws thousands of visitors to your site, a small percentage of those folks will stick around and continue to visit on a semi-regular basis (this is particularly true if you're delivering fresh, valuable content on a regular basis).

In the screen capture above, we can see that around week 13 of 2006, SEOmoz had some big linkbait that helped to give the site's visitors a bump that lasted all the way until week 29, when we had another big piece (and we've been on a bit of a roll since then, too). This traffic "bump" after the spike is another of the great benefits of creating viral-worthy content, and is a terrific way to grow the popularity of a site.

In my honest opinion, most of the traffic growth from this blog can be attributed to this phenomenon almost entirely - the pattern of spike, bump, coast has repeated itself to varying degrees across our 3 year lifespan. The tricky part has been to continue to deliver great content after a viral piece and maintain the creative energy necessary to prove to visitors that you're worth coming back to again and again. It's not an easy sell - people's time is valuable. You have to make your content so targeted, interesting and worthy of their attention that they can't look away. It's challenging and time consuming, but it's a great way to build a successful site.