Figure 1 Corporate Finance Traffic Stats
The search for incremental traffic and revenues continues on Learning Corporate Finance, the finance E-education portal I have now been running since early March 2010. First the good news. Apparantely all the directory submission work done in May 2010 has finally started to payoff. Either that or Google has loosened the traffic spigot. Where as in June we were lucky to break 50 – 70 unique visitors a day, in July and August traffic has steadly climbed to a level where we routinely see 200 plus visitors a day during the week, 100 plus visitors a day on the weekend (I hate Sundays). The rolling monthly visitors rate in early September finally crossed 5,000 visitors a month and 10,000 page views a month. As Zafar said today, there is still a long way to go before we cross a 100,000 page views a month, but if I can keep this growth up, we will cross the 50,000 page views a month mark by December 2010.
The other interesting thing we did was to start tracking a new Advance segment on Google Analytics, that we simply call Readers. While a typical user only views about 2 pages through our collection of online finance courses, a Reader on average view 8. Compared to the 2 minutes spend browsing by a typical visitor, a Reader spends anywhere between 8 – 10 minutes going through our free online mba courses. Most importantly Readers while being a small part of the overall visitor community, generate more than half the traffic on any given day. So growing this core group of regular and repeat visitor is the objective for the next few months. I had an interesting exchange of ideas with Zafar this morning and we will soon be making some new changes to the Finance online education portal.
In August Pageviews, Visitors and Adsense revenues all jumped together. The table belows shows the numbers for August, July, June, May and the first 3 days of September 2010. You can clearly see that in the first four days of September we have already crossed the May traffic watermark. On the revenue side we closed July at 5.12 US$ in adsense revenues. August surprisingly enough jumped to 8.78 US$. More importantly in the first four days in September we crossed 2.2 US$ possibly setting up September as the month where Learning Corporate Finance would cover its hosting cost for the first time.
Par of this was obviously due to the fact that we are now averaging about 1,000 adsense unit impressions a day on the Corporate Finance Education portal
Here is the growth in the Reader segment and their pageviews contribution for August, July, June, May and the first three days of September in that order. Lets see how well we can work with this segment in September.
