In my day job I help businesses with their website strategy – I'm what's called an information architect. That's right, have a good laugh.

Anyway, one of the things I do is keep an eye on website statistics to see how sites are performing. This being a member site I thought it might be of interest to y'all to have a sneaky peak at the monthly numbers.

Here's a few things I've noticed in this month's report.

• 2,286 visits, 11,474 page views, 5.15 pages per visit and a time on site of 4:17 are all very healthy stats. These numbers mean we have content that people are really getting into.
• The site had 2,286 visits, with 1,335 unique visitors (that means some people visit a few times).
  
  • The site is reaching well beyond the 280-odd members we have.
  • Return visitation is healthy as well.
• The peaks on 23 May and 30 May are the traffic spikes from the first and second weekly emails.
  • Since they began the weekly emails seem to shape the traffic for the week with Monday and Tuesday being the busiest days on the site.

Inbound search keywords

The top ten keywords used on search engines to arrive at Sydney Poetry (after sifting out direct hit terms like "sydney poetry") are:

1. coalcliff days – 28 (1.91%)
2. poetry caravan st peters – 23 (1.57%)
3. roberta lowing – 20 (1.37%)
4. hive bar poetry – 19 (1.3%)
5. eileen chong – 16 (1.09%)
6. poetry and the contemporary – 16 (1.09%)
7. ali kennedy scott – 14 (0.96%)
8. spoken word poetry sydney – 11 (0.75%)
9. self publishing sydney – 11(0.75%)
10. slam poetry reading sydney city april – 10 (0.68%)

Not surprisingly inbound search seems to mostly be about poets and events.

What's it all mean

The time on site and pages per visit are really healthy – a lot of commercial websites spend bucketloads of money on content and marketing to get to figures like that – we just have poetry. It's great to see the site means this much to people already.

The figures also show the relevance of the weekly email – members are clicking through to the site when it arrives and checking out the details. Another thing I noticed after starting the email is that people are adding things to the site.

Overall this is a picture of health.

Let me know in the comments if you find this interesting, or have any questions about the numbers.