I’ve been meaning to publish some basic traffic stats from sourgrapes.ie for a while now, and having read this post from internet chef Niall Harbison, I thought it was a good time to get the finger out.
A bit of background on this here wine blog
I kicked the wine blog all off on November 5th, 2007 with Wine 2.0 series: Essential Wine Websites for your cellar with zero visitors.
Here’s a snapshot of what’s been happening since then:
- 176 posts
- 443 approved comments
- 8,590 spam comments have been corked by Aksimet
- Only one threatened defamation/slander/libel action (he wasn’t sure of the difference, bless him)
- Quite a lot of wine drunk, needless to say
Visitor Stats: 5th November 2007 – 23rd December 2008
- 26,103 Visits
- 50,439 Pageviews
- 1.93 Pages/Visit
- 77.58% New Visits
Visits: December 2008 versus December 2007
- 3,487 Visits in December 2008 (390 in 2007)
- 5,729 Pageviews (975 in 2007)
- 1.64 Pages/Visit (2.5 in 2007)
- 85.75% are New Visits (55% in 2007)
Traffic Sources: 5th November 2007 – 23rd December 2008
- Search Engines: 16,276 (61.63% with Google accounting for a whopping 58.72% of this figure)
- Referring Sites: 7,723 (29.24%)
- Direct Traffic: 2,409 (9.12%)
Top visitor countries (December 2008)
3,511 visits came from 93 countries/territories. Here are the top ten:
- Ireland
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Germany
- France
- Netherlands
- Australia
- Spain
- Switzerland
Top 5 referrers (not including search engines)
- twitter.com (738)
- Irish Wine Contemplations (628 – thanks Will)
- irishblogs.ie (269)
- gastronom.ie (200 – thanks Damien!)
- Dine & Wine Club Cork (185 – thanks Elke)
There are obviously a lot more websites with links to sourgrapes.ie out there, so thanks to you all. To publish them all, we’re talking about something called the Long Tail, and I’m not sure how well it translates to short lists!
The Top 5 sourgrapes.ie wine blog posts by visits
Excluding the homepage and category pages, the following are the top five blog posts since 5th November 2007:
- Chablis, Sancerre, Pouilly Fumé & my old Nike Air Jordans
- Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc, Private Bin 2007 (Marlborough, New Zealand)
- Homemade burger recipe
- Inaugural open wine tasting evening: April 15th
- Premier & Grand Crus from Côte d’Or, Burgundy
Conclusions?
Bearing in mind that wine is quite niche (at least in terms of wanting to go out and read about it), I’m fairly happy with the the stats.
It’s also important to note that there is no monetiztion in place on sourgrapes.ie (unless you include free wine samples), so it’s all just “vanilytics” (vanity analytics).
However, the big picture goes up and to the right in terms of visits, so things are looking rosé for the new year – as long as I keep drinking and writing.
Want more stats?
If you’d like any more detail, leave a comment below (or ) and I’d be happy to share.
Equally, I’d love to get some feedback on the site and what you’d like to see more or less of?
Note: I neglected to include FeedBurner stats – i.e. those that read the site using an RSS Reader rather than visiting the site directly.
Over the last month, the average number of RSS subscribers is 139
Good on ya Lars, great encouragement there for budding journalists or people simply devoted to their hobby! Keep up the great work, I think its so important to have articulate, accessible and totally independent voices out there.
Congrats Lar on getting your traffic going in 2008. Glad we were able to some your way. All the best for 2009!
Thanks, Michael. Would you like to see my advertising rate card or would that impinge on my total independence?
Ha ha, only if I pay you tell everyone how great we are! :)
[...] to subscribe to my site using a feedreader or email. Thanks for visiting – Damien.Delighted to see SourGrapes.ie doing well on traffic. It’s a great website. Consider bookmarking or [...]
Great to see your hard work paying off for you. Good to see that Twitter can really be a source of traffic.
If you don’t mind me asking, what did the bounce rate look like for your different sources of traffic ? I see you are using Google Analytics, and they provide such stats.
Paul
Hi Paul,
thanks for the comment, here are the bounce rates for the top 5 referrers:
Twitter: 64%
Irish Wine Contemplations: 51%
irishblogs.ie: 70%
gastronom.ie: 65%
Dine & Wine Club Cork: 53%
Good work, i’ve been dropping in a bit lately – i’ll be in touch with you very soon about a wine related yokey i’m nearly ready to launch, it’d be great to have you involved in some way :-)
Hi Hugh,
would be delighted to. Drop me a line on and we can talk about next steps.
Lar